Russian alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pgina 1 de 5

Russian alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Russian alphabet (Russian: rsskij alfavt) is a form of the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School. The modern Russian alphabet contains 33 letters.

Contents
1 Alphabet 2 Letters names 3 Non-vocalized letters 4 Vowels 5 Letters in disuse by 1750 6 Numeric values 7 Stress 7.1 Acute accent 8 Keyboard layout 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 12 External links

Russian alphabet in capital letters

Alphabet
The Russian alphabet is as follows:

Letter Handwriting Name [a] [b] [v] [] [d] [je] [jo] [] [z] [i] [i kratk] [ka] or [el] or [el] [m] [n] o [o] [p]

Old name [as] [buk] [ved] [lol] [dbro] [jest] [vet][1] [zmla] [i] [ s kratkj] [kak] [ld] [mslet][2] [na] [on] [pkoj]

IPA /a/ /b/ or /b/ /v/ or /v/ // /d/ or /d/ /je/ or /e/ /jo/ or /o/ // /z/ or /z/ /i/ or /i/ /j/ /k/ or /k/ /l/ or /l/ /m/ or /m/ /n/ or /n/ /o/ /p/ or /p/

English example father bit vine go do yet yolk pleasure zoo me yes kitten lamp map not more spell

1 2 3 4 5 7 8 20 30 40 50 70 80

Unicode (Hex) U+0410 / U+0430 U+0411 / U+0431 U+0412 / U+0432 U+0413 / U+0433 U+0414 / U+0434 U+0415 / U+0435 U+0401 / U+0451 U+0416 / U+0436 U+0417 / U+0437 U+0418 / U+0438 U+0419 / U+0439 U+041A / U+043A U+041B / U+043B U+041C / U+043C U+041D / U+043D U+041E / U+043E U+041F / U+043F

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet

16/04/2012

Russian alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pgina 2 de 5

[r] [s] [t] [u] [f] [xa] [ts] [te] [a] [a]

[rts] [slov] [tvrd] [uk] [frt] [xr] [ts] [trf] [a] [ta]

/r/ or /r/ /s/ or /s/ /t/ or /t/ /u/ /f/ or /f/ /x/ /ts/ /t/ // //

rolled r

100 U+0420 / U+0440 200 300 400 500 600 900 90 U+0421 / U+0441 U+0422 / U+0442 U+0423 / U+0443 U+0424 / U+0444 U+0425 / U+0445 U+0426 / U+0446 U+0427 / U+0447 U+0428 / U+0448 U+0429 / U+0449 U+042A / U+044A U+042B / U+044B U+042C / U+044C U+042D / U+044D U+042E / U+044E U+042F / U+044F

see stool boot face Ugh (voiceless velar fricative) sits chip Close to shut (voiceless retroflex fricative) sheer (sometimes instead pronounced as with fresh cheese) (a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative) silent, prevents palatalization of the preceding consonant

[tvordj znak] [jer] [] [mxkj znak] [] [ju] [ja] [jr] [jer] [ brotn] [ju] [ja] [i] [fta] [jt] [its] [zlo][3] [ksi] [psi] [me] [jus bloj] [jus mlj] [jus bloj jtirvnnj] [] // /e/ /ju/ or /u/ /ja/ or /a/

roses or silly (close central unrounded vowel) silent, slightly palatalises the preceding consonant (if it is phonologically possible) met use yard

letters eliminated in 1917-1918 /i/ or /i/ or /j/ /f/ or /f/ /e/ or /e/ /i/ or /i/ Like or Like Like Like or (sometimes in spellings of the 18th century) 10 9

letters eliminated before 1750 /z/ or /z/ Like 6 60 700 800

/ks/ or /ks/ Like /ps/ or /ps/ Like /o/ /u/, /ju/ or /u/ /ja/ or /a/ Like Like or Like

/ju/ or /u/ /ja/ or /a/

Like

Like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet

16/04/2012

Russian alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pgina 3 de 5

[jus mlj jtirvn.nj] The consonant letters represent both "soft" (palatalised, represented in the IPA with a ) and "hard" phonemes, depending (with some exceptions) on whether the iotated or softening vowel letters follow. The transcriptions of the names of the letters attempt to reflect the reduction of non-stressed vowels. See Russian phonology for details.

Letters names
Until approximately 1900, mnemonic names inherited from Church Slavonic were used for the letters. They are given here in the pre-1918 orthography of the post-1708 civil alphabet. The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote: "The letters constituting the Slavonic alphabet do not produce any sense. , , , , etc. are separate words, chosen just for their initial sound". But since the names of the first letters of the Slavonic alphabet seem to form text, attempts were made to compose sensible text from all letters of the alphabet. Here is one such attempt to "decode" the message: I know letters "To speak is a beneficence" or "The word is property" "try to understand the Universe (the world that is around)" "carry the knowledge ("word" here refers to "knowledge") firmly" "The knowledge is fertilized by the Creator, knowledge is the gift of God" "Try harder, to understand the Light of the Creator"

, , "Live, while working heartily, people of the Earth, in the manner people should obey"

In this attempt words only in two first lines somewhat correspond to real meanings of the letters' names, while "translations" in other lines seem to be fabrications or fantasies. For example, "" ("rest" or "apartment") doesn't mean "the Universe", and "" doesn't have any meaning in Russian or other Slavonic languages (there are no words of Slavonic origin beginning with "f" at all). The last line contains only one translatable word "" ("worm"), which, however, was not included in the "translation". Another version of "the message", incorporating the letters phased out by mid-1750s, reads: Translation "Knowing all these letters renders speech a virtue. Evil "() . A(v)sye bukvy vyedaya glagolit' dobro yest'. Zhivyet zlo lives on Earth eternally, and each person must think of () (na) zyemlye vyechno i kazhdomu lyudinu myslit' nado o repentance, with speech and word making firm in their , () pokayaniyi, ryech'yu (i) slovom tverdit' uchyeniye vyery mind the faith in Christ and the Kingdom of God. () , , Khristovoy (v) Tsarstviye Bozhiye, chashchye sheptat', Whisper [the letters] frequently to make them yours by ( ) () shchtob (vsye bukvy) (vz)yatiyem etim usvoyit' i po this repetition in order to write and live according to laws " zakonam bozh'im stremit'sya pisat' slova i zhit') of God". Verse Transliteration

Non-vocalized letters
hard sign (<>), when put after a consonant, acts like a "silent back vowel" that separates a succeeding iotated vowel from the consonant, making that sound with a distinct /j/ glide. Today it is used mostly to separate a prefix from the following root. Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, // but likely pronounced [] or [] soft sign (<>) acts like a "silent front vowel" and indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized. This is important as palatalization is phonemic in Russian. For example, [brat] ('brother') contrasts with [brat] ('to take'). The original pronunciation of the soft sign, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short fronted reduced vowel // but likely pronounced [] or [j]. There are still some remains of this ancient reading in modern Russian, in the co-existing versions of the same name, read differently, such as in and (Mary).

Vowels
The vowels , , , , indicate a preceding palatal consonant and with the exception of are iotated (pronounced with a preceding /j/) when written at the beginning of a word or following another vowel (initial was iotated until the nineteenth century). The IPA vowels shown are a guideline only and sometimes are realized as different sounds, particularly when unstressed. However, is used in words of foreign origin without palatalization and indicate /e/. Which words this applies to must be learned (generally to avoid using after a consonant), and is often realized as [] between soft consonants, such as in ("toy ball"). is an old Common Slavonic tense intermediate vowel, thought to have been preserved better in modern Russian than in other Slavic languages. It was originally nasalized in certain positions: [ka.m]; [ka.mn] ("rock"). Its written form developed as follows: + . was introduced in 1708 to distinguish the non-iotated/non-palatalizing /e/ from the iotated/palatalizing one. The original usage had been for the uniotated /e/, or for the iotated, but had dropped out of use by the sixteenth century. In native Russian words, is found only at the beginnings of words, but otherwise it may be found elsewhere, such as when spelling out English or other foreign names, or in words of foreign origin such as the brand-name Aeroflot (). , introduced by Karamzin in 1797 and made official in 1943 by the Soviet Ministry of Education,[4] marks a /jo/ sound that has historically developed from /je/ under stress, a process that continues today. The letter is optional (in writing, not in pronunciation): it is formally correct to write e for both /je/ and /jo/. None of the several attempts in the twentieth century to mandate the use of have stuck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet

16/04/2012

Russian alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pgina 4 de 5

Grapheme

Name

Letters eliminated in 1918 Description

identical in pronunciation to , was used exclusively immediately in front of other vowels and the ("Short I") (for example, Decimal [ptrarx], 'patriarch') and in the word [mir] ('world') and its derivatives, to distinguish it from the word [mir] ('peace') (the two I words are actually etymologically cognate[5] and not arbitrarily homonyms).[6] Fita Yat Izhitsa from the Greek theta, was identical to in pronunciation, but was used etymologically (for example, "Theodore"). originally had a distinct sound, but by the middle of the eighteenth century had become identical in pronunciation to in the standard language. Since its elimination in 1918, it has remained a political symbol of the old orthography. from the Greek upsilon, was identical to in pronunciation, as in Byzantine Greek, but was used etymologically; though by 1918 it had become very rare.

Letters in disuse by 1750

and derived from Greek letters xi and psi, used etymologically though inconsistently in secular writing until the eighteenth century, and more consistently to the present day in Church Slavonic. is the Greek letter omega, identical in pronunciation to , used in secular writing until the eighteenth century, but to the present day in Church Slavonic, mostly to distinguish inflexional forms otherwise written identically. corresponded to a more archaic /dz/ pronunciation, already absent in East Slavic at the start of the historical period, but kept by tradition in certain words until the eighteenth century in secular writing, and in Church Slavonic to the present day. The yuses and , letters that originally used to stand for nasalised vowels // and //, had become, according to linguistic reconstruction, irrelevant for East Slavic phonology already at the beginning of the historical period, but were introduced along with the rest of the Cyrillic script. The letters and had largely vanished by the twelfth century. The uniotated continued to be used, etymologically, until the sixteenth century. Thereafter it was restricted to being a dominical letter in the Paschal tables. The seventeenth-century usage of and (see next note) survives in contemporary Church Slavonic. The letter was adapted to represent the iotated /ja/ in the middle or end of a word; the modern letter is an adaptation of its cursive form of the seventeenth century, enshrined by the typographical reform of 1708. Until 1708, the iotated /ja/ was written a at the beginning of a word. This distinction between and a survives in Church Slavonic. Although it is usually stated that the letters labelled "fallen into disuse by the eighteenth century" in the table above were eliminated in the typographical reform of 1708, reality is somewhat more complex. The letters were indeed originally omitted from the sample alphabet, printed in a western-style serif font, presented in Peter's edict, along with the modern letter , but were reinstated under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church in a later variant of the modern typeface. Nonetheless, they fell completely out of use in secular writing by 1750.

Numeric values
19. The numerical values correspond to the Greek numerals, with being used for digamma, for koppa, and for sampi. The system was abandoned for secular purposes in 1708, after a transitional period of a century or so; it continues to be used in Church Slavonic.

Stress
In Russian, word stress is mostly unpredictable and can fall on different syllables in different forms of the same word or on the ending.

Acute accent
In Russian, an acute accent (Russian znak udareniya "mark of stress"; U+0301) marks stress on a vowel. The diacritic is only used in special cases: in dictionaries, children's books, or language-learning resources, on minimal pairs distinguished only by stress (for instance, "castle" and "lock") or rare or foreign words, and in poems where unusual stress is used to fit the meter. Stress on the letter is not marked, as it is always stressed, except in some loanwords.

Keyboard layout
The Russian keyboard layout for PC computers is as follows:

See also
Russian language Bulgarian language Romanization of Russian Computer russification Russian phonology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet

16/04/2012

Russian alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pgina 5 de 5

Cyrillic script Reforms of Russian orthography Russian cursive (handwritten letters) Russian orthography Church Slavonic language Yoficator

Notes
1. ^ Article (http://slovari.yandex.ru/dict/ushakov/article/ushakov/07/us186306.htm?text=%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B5) from " " ("Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language"; the dictionary makes difference between and , cf.: (http://slovari.yandex.ru/dict/ushakov/article/ushakov/06/us183315.htm?text=%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BA%D0%B0) ). 2. ^ Article (http://slovari.yandex.ru/dict/ushakov/article/ushakov/13/us228814.htm) from " " ("Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language"). 3. ^ (http://feb-web.ru/feb/sl18/slov-abc/08/sl816402.htm?cmd=2&istext=1) 4. ^ Benson (1960:271) 5. ^ Vasmer (1979); see the etymology of the Russian word at here (http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=%2Fusr%2Flocal%2Fshare%2Fstarling% 2Fmorpho&morpho=0&basename=%5Cusr%5Clocal%5Cshare%5Cstarling%5Cmorpho%5Cvasmer%5Cvasmer&first=1&text_word=%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1% 80&method_word=beginning&text_general=&method_general=substring&text_origin=&method_origin=substring&text_trubachev=&method_trubachev=substring&text_editorial=&meth an online version of the Russian translation of the dictionary. (retr. 16 October 2005) 6. ^ Smirnovskiy (1915:4)

References
Benson, Morton (1960), "review of The Russian Alphabet by Thomas F. Magner", The Slavic and East European Journal 4 (3): 271272 Smirnovskiy, P. (1915), A Textbook in Russian Grammar. Part I. Etymology (http://members.shaw.ca/arsoys/smirnovsky-etymology.djvu) (26th ed.), http://members.shaw.ca/arsoys/smirnovsky-etymology.djvu Vasmer, Max (1979), Russian Etymological Dictionary, Winter

External links
Russian alphabet and language learning exercises (http://learners-library.org/index.php?page=languages/language&id=30) Cyrillic Virtual Keyboard (Cyrillic Fonts) with Russian Spellcheck (http://softcorporation.com/products/cyrillic/) CyrAcademisator (http://podolak.net/en/russian-studies/cyracademisator) Bi-directional online transliteration for ALA-LC (diacritics), scientific, ISO/R 9, ISO 9, GOST 7.79B and others. Supports Old Slavonic characters Google Knol: How to Read the Russian Alphabet in 75 Minutes (http://knol.google.com/k/david-petherick/how-to-read-russian-in-75-minutes/3gtd3hu64fjvx/2) Russian alphabet audio slowly and at normal speed. Five letters at a time. (http://learn-russian.language101.com/lesson/?id=30078025) Learn Russian Alphabet (http://wikitranslate.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet) (Videos) Sounds of individual letters of Russian Alphabet (http://www.russianforeveryone.com/RufeA/Lessons/Introduction/Alphabet/Alphabet.htm) How to read Russian (with audio) (http://www.russianforfree.com/lessons-how-to-read-in-russian-01.php) Course with audio and reading exercises Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_alphabet&oldid=485896080" Categories: Russian language Cyrillic alphabets Russian-language computing This page was last modified on 6 April 2012 at 13:11. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet

16/04/2012