From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Russian alphabet
Russian alphabet
Гг гэ глаголь /ɡ/
[ɡɛ] [ɡlɐˈɡolʲ]
Дд дэ добро /d/
[dɛ] [dɐˈbro] or
/dʲ/
Ее е есть /je/
[je] [jesʲtʲ] or
/ ʲe/
Ёё ё – /jo/
[jo] or
/ ʲo/
Жж жэ живѣте /ʐ/
[ʐɛ] [ʐɨˈvʲetʲɪ][1]
Зз зэ земля /z/
[zɛ] [zʲɪˈmlʲa] or
/zʲ/
Ии и иже /i/
[i] [ˈiʐɨ] or
Russian alphabet in capital letters / ʲi/
Йй и краткое и съ краткой /j/
The Russian alphabet (Russian: русский алфавит [i ˈkratkəɪ] [ɪ s ˈkratkəj]
rússkij alfavít) is a form of the Cyrillic script, developed in
the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at
Кк ка како /k/
the Preslav Literary School. The modern Russian alpha-
[ka] [ˈkakə] or
bet contains 33 letters.
/kʲ/
Лл эл or эль люди /l/
Alphabet Russian pronuncia- [ˈlʲʉdʲɪ] or
tion: [[WP:IPA for Rus- /lʲ/
The Russian alphabet is as follows: sian|el]] or [elʲ]
Мм эм мыслѣте /m/
[ɛm] [mɨˈsʲlʲetʲɪ][2] or
Letter Handwriting Name Old name IPA English ex- № Unicode /mʲ/
Нн ample эн Hex)
(Hex) нашъ /n/
Аа а азъ /a/ father
a [ɛn]
1 U+0410 [naʂ] or
[a] [as] / /nʲ/
Оо o U+0430 онъ /o/
Бб бэ буки /b/ bit [o]– U+0411 [on]
[bɛ] [ˈbukʲɪ] or /
Пп/bʲ/ пэ U+0431 покой /p/
Вв вэ вѣди /v/ vine [pɛ]
2 U+0412 [pɐˈkoj] or
[vɛ] [ˈvʲedʲɪ] or / /pʲ/
Рр/vʲ/ эр U+0432 рцы /r/
[ɛr] [rtsɨ] or
/rʲ/
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Russian alphabet
Сс эс слово Яя/s/ see я 200 U+0421 я /ja/
[ɛs] [ˈslovə] or [ja] / [ja] or
/sʲ/ U+0441 / ʲa/
Тт тэ твердо /t/ stool
t 300 U+0422
letters eliminated in 1918
[tɛ] [ˈtvʲɛrdə] Іі or – – / і /i/
/tʲ/ U+0442 десятеричное or
Уу у укъ /u/ boo
oot 400 U+0423 [i] / ʲi/
[u] [uk] Ѳѳ – – / ѳита /f/
U+0443 [fʲɪˈta] or
Фф эф фертъ /f/ face 500 U+0424 /fʲ/
[ɛf] [fʲɛrt] or –
Ѣѣ – / ять /e/
/fʲ/ U+0444 [jætʲ] or
Хх ха хѣръ /x/ Ugh (voiceless 600 U+0425
gh / ʲe/
[xa] [xʲɛr] Ѵѵ – velar fricative)– / ижица /i/
U+0445 [ˈiʐɨtsə] or
Цц це цы /t͡s/ ts
sits 900 U+0426 / ʲi/
[tsɛ] [t͡sɨ] /
letters in disuse by the 18th century
U+0446
Ѕѕ – – зѣло /dz/,
Чч че червь /t͡ɕ/ chchip 90 U+0427 [zʲɪˈlo][3] /z/
[tɕe] [t͡ɕɛrfʲ] / or
U+0447 /zʲ/
Шш ша ша shut
Ѯѯ/ʂ/ – sh (voiceless– – U+0428 кси /ks/
[ʂa] [ʂa] retroflex frica- / [ksʲi] or
tive) U+0448 /ksʲ/
Щщ ща ща /ɕɕ/ – sh
Ѱѱ sheer (some- – – U+0429 пси /ps/
[ɕɕa] [ɕt͡ɕa] times instead / [psʲi] or
pronounced U+0449 /psʲ/
sh
as with fresh
Ѡѡ – – омега /o/
cheese) (a
ch
[ɐˈmʲeɡə]
voiceless
Ѫѫ – alveolo-palatal– юсъ большой /u/,
fricative) [jus bɐlʲˈʂoj] /ju/
or
Ъъ твёрдый знак еръ silent, pre- – U+042A
/ ʲu/
[ˈtvʲordɨj znak] [jer] vents palatal- /
Ѧѧ – ization of the– U+044A юсъ малый /ja/
preceding [jus ˈmɑlɨj] or
consonant / ʲa/
Ыы ы еры Ѭѭ – roses or silly – –
[ɨ] e i U+042B юсъ большой /ju/
[ɨ] [jɪˈrɨ] (close central / іотированный or
unrounded U+044B [jus bɐlʲˈʂoj / ʲu/
vowel) jɪˈtʲirəvənnɨj]
Ьь мягкий знак ерь Ѩѩ – silent, slight-– –
/ ʲ/ U+042C юсъ малый /ja/
[ˈmʲæxʲkʲɪj znak] [jerʲ] ly palatalises / іотированный or
the preced- U+044C [jus ˈmɑlɨj / ʲa/
ing conso- jɪˈtʲirəvən.nɨj]
The consonant letters represent both "soft" (palatalised,
nant
Ээ э э оборотное in
represented et the IPA with a ?ʲ?) and "hard" phonemes,
/e/ me – U+042D
[ɛ] [ˈɛ əbɐˈrotnəɪ]depending (with some exceptions) on whether the iotat-
/
ed or softening vowel letters follow. The transcriptions
U+044D
of the names of the letters attempt to reflect the reduc-
Юю ю ю /ju/ use – U+042E
tion of non-stressed vowels. See Russian phonology for
[ju] [ju] or /
details.
/ ʲu/ U+044E
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Russian alphabet
Letters names твердить
учение веры
uchyeniye vyery
Khristovoy (v)
faith in Christ and
the Kingdom of
Until approximately 1900, mnemonic names inherited Христовой (в) Tsarstviye God. Whisper [the
from Church Slavonic were used for the letters. They are Царствие Bozhiye, letters] frequent-
given here in the pre-1918 orthography of the post-1708 Божие, чаще chashchye shep- ly to make them
civil alphabet. шептать, щтоб tat’, shchtob yours by this rep-
The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote: (все буквы) (vsye bukvy) etition in order to
"The letters constituting the Slavonic alphabet do not (вз)ятием этим (vz)yatiyem etim write and live ac-
produce any sense. Аз, буки, веди, глаголь, добро etc. усвоить и по usvoyit’ i po za- cording to laws of
are separate words, chosen just for their initial sound". законам konam bozh’im God".
But since the names of the first letters of the Slavonic al- божьим stremit’sya pisat’
phabet seem to form text, attempts were made to com- стремиться slova i zhit’)
pose sensible text from all letters of the alphabet. писать слова и
Here is one such attempt to "decode" the message: жить"
аз буки веди I know letters
глаголь добро
есть
"To speak is a beneficence" or "The
word is property"
Non-vocalized letters
живете зело, "Live, while working heartily, peo- • hard sign (), when put after a consonant, acts like
земля, и иже и ple of the Earth, in the manner peo- a "silent back vowel" that separates a succeeding
како люди ple should obey" iotated vowel from the consonant, making that
sound with a distinct /j/ glide. Today it is used
мыслете наш "try to understand the Universe mostly to separate a prefix from the following root.
он покой (the world that is around)" Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest,
рцы слово "carry the knowledge ("word" here was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound,
твердо refers to "knowledge") firmly" /ŭ/ but likely pronounced [ə] or [ɯ]
ук ферт хер "The knowledge is fertilized by the • soft sign () acts like a "silent front vowel" and
Creator, knowledge is the gift of indicates that the preceding consonant is
God" palatalized. This is important as palatalization is
phonemic in Russian. For example, брат [brat]
цы червь ша ер "Try harder, to understand the
(’brother’) contrasts with брать [bratʲ] (’to take’).
ять ю Light of the Creator"
The original pronunciation of the soft sign, lost by
In this attempt words only in two first lines somewhat 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short fronted
correspond to real meanings of the letters’ names, while reduced vowel /ĭ/ but likely pronounced [ɪ] or [jɪ].
"translations" in other lines seem to be fabrications or There are still some remains of this ancient reading
fantasies. For example, "покой" ("rest" or "apartment") in modern Russian, in the co-existing versions of the
doesn’t mean "the Universe", and "ферт" doesn’t have ь
same name, read differently, such as in Марья and
any meaning in Russian or other Slavonic languages и
Мария (Mary).
(there are no words of Slavonic origin beginning with "f"
at all). The last line contains only one translatable word –
"червь" ("worm"), which, however, was not included in Vowels
the "translation". The vowels ?е, ё, и, ю, я? indicate a preceding palatal
Another version of "the message", incorporating the consonant and with the exception of ?и? are iotated (pro-
letters phased out by mid-1750s, reads: nounced with a preceding /j/) when written at the be-
Verse Transliteration Translation ginning of a word or following another vowel (initial ?и?
"А(в)се буквы A(v)sye bukvy "Knowing all was iotated until the nineteenth century). The IPA vow-
ведая глаголить vyedaya glagolit’ these letters ren- els shown are a guideline only and sometimes are real-
– добро есть. – dobro yest’. ders speech a ized as different sounds, particularly when unstressed.
Живет зло (на) Zhivyet zlo (na) virtue. Evil lives However, ?е? is used in words of foreign origin without
земле вечно и zyemlye vyechno on Earth eternal- palatalization and indicate /e/. Which words this applies
каждому i kazhdomu ly, and each per- to must be learned (generally to avoid using ?э? after a
людину lyudinu myslit’ son must think of consonant), and ?я? is often realized as [æ] between soft
мыслить надо о nado o repentance, with consonants, such as in мяч ("toy ball").
покаянии, pokayaniyi, speech and word ?ы? is an old Common Slavonic tense intermediate
речью (и) ryech’yu (i) making firm in vowel, thought to have been preserved better in modern
словом slovom tverdit’ their mind the Russian than in other Slavic languages. It was originally
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Russian alphabet
Letters eliminated in 1918
Grapheme Name Description
і Decimal identical in pronunciation to ?и?, was used exclusively immediately in front of other vowels
I and the ?й? ("Short I") (for example, ?патріархъ? [pətrʲɪˈarx], ’patriarch’) and in the word
?міръ? [mʲir] (’world’) and its derivatives, to distinguish it from the word ?миръ? [mʲir]
(’peace’) (the two words are actually etymologically cognate [5] and not arbitrarily
homonyms).[6]
ѳ Fita from the Greek theta, was identical to ?ф? in pronunciation, but was used etymologically (for
example, ?Ѳёдор? "Theodore").
ѣ Yat originally had a distinct sound, but by the middle of the eighteenth century had become identi-
cal in pronunciation to ?е? in the standard language. Since its elimination in 1918, it has re-
mained a political symbol of the old orthography.
ѵ Izhitsa from the Greek upsilon, was identical to ?и? in pronunciation, as in Byzantine Greek, but was
used etymologically; though by 1918 it had become very rare.
nasalized in certain positions: камы [ˈka.mɨ̃]; камень cording to linguistic reconstruction, irrelevant for East
[ˈka.mʲɪnʲ] ("rock"). Its written form developed as follows: Slavic phonology already at the beginning of the histori-
?ъ? + ?і? → ?ъı? → ?ы?. cal period, but were introduced along with the rest of the
?э? was introduced in 1708 to distinguish the non-io- Cyrillic script. The letters ?ѭ? and ?ѩ? had largely van-
tated/non-palatalizing /e/ from the iotated/palatalizing ished by the twelfth century. The uniotated ?ѫ? contin-
one. The original usage had been ?е? for the uniotated ued to be used, etymologically, until the sixteenth centu-
/e/, ?ѥ? or ?ѣ? for the iotated, but ?ѥ? had dropped out ry. Thereafter it was restricted to being a dominical let-
of use by the sixteenth century. In native Russian words, ter in the Paschal tables. The seventeenth-century usage
?э? is found only at the beginnings of words, but other- of ?ѫ? and ?ѧ? (see next note) survives in contemporary
wise it may be found elsewhere, such as when spelling Church Slavonic.
out English or other foreign names, or in words of foreign The letter ?ѧ? was adapted to represent the iotated
origin such as the brand-name Aeroflot (Аэрофлοτ). /ja/ ?я? in the middle or end of a word; the modern letter
?ё?, introduced by Karamzin in 1797 and made official ?я? is an adaptation of its cursive form of the seven-
in 1943 by the Soviet Ministry of Education,[4] marks a teenth century, enshrined by the typographical reform
/jo/ sound that has historically developed from /je/ un- of 1708.
der stress, a process that continues today. The letter ?ё? Until 1708, the iotated /ja/ was written ?ıa? at the be-
is optional (in writing, not in pronunciation): it is formally ginning of a word. This distinction between ?ѧ? and ?ıa?
correct to write ?e? for both /je/ and /jo/. None of the survives in Church Slavonic.
several attempts in the twentieth century to mandate the Although it is usually stated that the letters labelled
use of ?ё? have stuck. "fallen into disuse by the eighteenth century" in the table
above were eliminated in the typographical reform of
Letters in disuse by 1750 1708, reality is somewhat more complex. The letters were
indeed originally omitted from the sample alphabet,
?ѯ? and ?ѱ? derived from Greek letters xi and psi, used printed in a western-style serif font, presented in Peter’s
etymologically though inconsistently in secular writing edict, along with the modern letter ?й?, but were rein-
until the eighteenth century, and more consistently to stated under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church
the present day in Church Slavonic. in a later variant of the modern typeface. Nonetheless,
?ѡ? is the Greek letter omega, identical in pronunci- they fell completely out of use in secular writing by 1750.
ation to ?о?, used in secular writing until the eighteenth
century, but to the present day in Church Slavonic, most-
ly to distinguish inflexional forms otherwise written
Numeric values
identically. 19. The numerical values correspond to the Greek nu-
?ѕ? corresponded to a more archaic /dz/ pronunci- merals, with ?ѕ? being used for digamma, ?ч? for koppa,
ation, already absent in East Slavic at the start of the and ?ц? for sampi. The system was abandoned for secular
historical period, but kept by tradition in certain words purposes in 1708, after a transitional period of a century
until the eighteenth century in secular writing, and in or so; it continues to be used in Church Slavonic.
Church Slavonic to the present day.
The yuses ?ѫ? and ?ѧ?, letters that originally used to
stand for nasalised vowels /õ/ and /ẽ/, had become, ac-
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Russian alphabet
Stress [2] Article мыслете from "Толковый словарь
русского языка Ушакова" ("Ushakov’s
In Russian, word stress is mostly unpredictable and can Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language").
fall on different syllables in different forms of the same [3] ФЭБ
word or on the ending. [4] Benson (1960:271)
[5] Vasmer (1979); see the etymology of the Russian
Acute accent word мир at here, an online version of the Russian
In Russian, an acute accent ?◌́? (Russian знак ударения translation of the dictionary. (retr. 16 October
znak udareniya "mark of stress"; U+0301) marks stress on 2005)
a vowel. The diacritic is only used in special cases: in [6] Smirnovskiy (1915:4)
dictionaries, children’s books, or language-learning re-
sources, on minimal pairs distinguished only by stress References
(for instance, за́мок "castle" and замо́к "lock") or rare or
foreign words, and in poems where unusual stress is used • Benson, Morton (1960), "review of The Russian
to fit the meter. Stress on the letter ё is not marked, as it Alphabet by Thomas F. Magner", The Slavic and East
is always stressed, except in some loanwords. European Journal 4 (3): 271–272
• Smirnovskiy, P. (1915), A Textbook in Russian Grammar.
Part I. Etymology (26th ed.), http://members.shaw.ca/
Keyboard layout arsoys/smirnovsky-etymology.djvu
The Russian keyboard layout for PC computers is as fol- • Vasmer, Max (1979), Russian Etymological Dictionary,
lows: Winter
External links
• Russian alphabet and language learning exercises
• Cyrillic Virtual Keyboard (Cyrillic Fonts) with
Russian Spellcheck
• CyrAcademisator Bi-directional online
See also transliteration for ALA-LC (diacritics), scientific,
• Russian language ISO/R 9, ISO 9, GOST 7.79B and others. Supports Old
• Bulgarian language Slavonic characters
• Romanization of Russian • Google Knol: How to Read the Russian Alphabet in 75
• Computer russification Minutes
• Russian phonology • Russian alphabet audio slowly and at normal speed.
• Cyrillic script Five letters at a time.
• Reforms of Russian orthography • Learn Russian Alphabet (Videos)
• Russian cursive (handwritten letters) • Sounds of individual letters of Russian Alphabet
• Russian orthography • How to read Russian (with audio) Course with audio
• Church Slavonic language and reading exercises
• Yoficator
Notes
[1] Article живете from "Толковый словарь
русского языка Ушакова" ("Ushakov’s
Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language";
the dictionary makes difference between е and ё,
cf.: ёлка).
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_alphabet&oldid=468272571"
Categories:
• Russian language
• Cyrillic alphabets
• Russian-language computing
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Russian alphabet
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