Difficult to write letters were replaced with a civilian font. These are the letters with minor modifications that we use now. A new civil alphabet was written.
But in 1918, another language reform was carried out, which changed the pre-revolutionary Russian language and transformed it into a modern one. What was this reform? What was the pre-revolutionary language in Russia? How was it different from the modern one?
Features of the pre-revolutionary language
The pre-reform alphabet of the Russian language consisted of 35 letters, the modern alphabet - 33.
The alphabet of the pre-revolutionary language included the letters “i” - “i”, “fita” - “ѳ”, “izhitsa” - “ѵ”, “yat” - “ѣ”, but there were no modern “th” and “e”.
The letter “Izhitsa” was not officially abolished; the Decree on Spelling Reform did not say anything about it; it was not remembered, since it was practically no longer used.
Features of the pronunciation of letters in the pre-reform Russian language
Initially they used church names: “az”, “buki”, “vedi”, “verb” and so on. From the end of the 18th century, letters began to be named after Latin ones, and by the end of the 19th century, new names were formed that completely replaced the old ones. The new names of the letters practically coincided with the modern ones, but after the consonants in their names there was not “e” but “e”, for example “be”, “ve”, “ge” and so on, with the exception of the letters “ь” (er), “y” (er), “b” (er), “yati”, “izhitsa” and “fity”. The letter “and” was called “and octal”, and “i” was called “and decimal”, this corresponded to their numerical value in the Church Slavonic alphabet.
The letters “e” and “y” were not included in the alphabet of the pre-revolutionary language only formally, but were used in the same way as now. The letter "th" was called "and with short".
As a result of the reform of the Russian alphabet, “yat”, “fita”, “izhitsa” and “er” (at the end of the word) were excluded from it. What are these letters and why were they removed from the pre-reform alphabet?
"Yat"
The letter is very similar to the symbol that astronomers use to mark the planet Saturn. The letters “ҍ” and “e” were pronounced exactly the same, for example, “wind” and “evening”, but in the word “wind” they wrote “yat”, and in the word “evening” - “e”. This caused enormous difficulties. The letter “yat” was considered the most terrible in the alphabet. Students mechanically memorized the rules for “yat”; mistakes when writing this letter were considered the most serious. Since then, the expression “to know in yat” has developed, which means “very good.”
"Izhitsa"
The letter “Izhitsa” in the alphabet of the pre-revolutionary language was very similar to the Roman numeral “five”. To our ancestors it resembled an inverted whip, which is why the common people had the expression “prescribe Izhitsa,” which meant “give a strong scolding” or “flog.” The letter also caused a lot of inconvenience and made life difficult for students, for example, three words:
- world - meaning “universe”;
- peace - “calmness, silence”;
- myrrh is a fragrant substance.
It would seem that the words are pronounced the same, but they are written differently:
- in the first word they wrote “and with a dot” - peace;
- in the second - “and” - world;
- in the third - “Izhitsa” - miro.
There were many difficulties; many were confused about the rules for writing certain words. Also Pushkin A.S. in 1818 he believed that “Izhitsa” should be abolished, but it was abolished only in 1918.
"Fita"
The modern letter “f” and the pre-revolutionary “fita - ѳ” were in different places in the alphabet, but were pronounced exactly the same. For example, in the pre-revolutionary address directory, people with the surname Fedorov were not placed together, since some were written with the letter “f”, and others with “fita”. Why is that? Trediakovsky V. in 1748 in his article “Conversation about Spelling” explained this by saying that you shouldn’t think at all about where you need to write “f” and where “fitu”, it doesn’t matter, since not everyone studied Latin and Greek languages, and without knowledge of these languages it is impossible to know the difference in these letters. That’s how they wrote it, whatever they want, because still few people understand how to do it correctly.
"Er"
This is the so-called solid sign. Currently, it is considered a very useful letter, separating the consonant of the prefix from the vowel (entrance, rise). And before the reform, the hard sign was written after hard consonants at the end of all words, for example, oak, rode, dom. "Er" was popularly called a "parasite", "idler", "bloodsucker". In fact, the letter that was written at the end of almost every word consumed, according to scientists, 8% of paper and time. For example, Uspensky L. in the book “A Word about Words” wrote that in one edition of the book (in pre-revolutionary language) “War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy. on 2080 pages there were about 115 thousand “er”. If they were all put together and printed in a row, they would take up more than 70 pages. And if you calculate that typing a novel required about 100 working days, then it would take about 4 days for a typist to type only this letter. How much paper was spent on it? It's generally difficult to say. "Er" was the most expensive letter in the world.
Pre-revolutionary language in modern Russia
The fashion for the pre-reform Russian language re-emerged during the perestroika period and in the early 90s. At that time, a lot of pre-revolutionary literature was published, and it was published according to the rules of the old spelling. Websites began to appear on the Internet, completely typed in the old spelling, and articles and publications began to be published.
It has become fashionable to use elements of pre-reform spelling of words in advertising and on signs (and with errors).
Very often, “creative” designers of advertising signs followed a simple principle, without thinking about spelling rules, simply adding the letter “ъ” to the end of the word. This is how newfangled signs appeared, on which in those days they could write “Izhitsa”, for example, for many years the logo “Capital Savings Bank” was displayed on all signs and advertising brochures, although the correct spelling would have been “Capital Savings Bank”. And, unfortunately, there are a lot of such examples.
Fashion has returned, but literacy has not.
What was the vowel of the Old Russian language, denoted by the letter Ѣ (“yat”), is now not known exactly. Apparently it was the sound of the front row and mid-upper rise. After XIV centuries it coincided in pronunciation with[uh] in Russian and Belarusian languages, with [i] – in Ukrainian, for example: forest - l i s, snow - sn iG etc. In various Russian dialects, in place of this ancient sound they pronounced[and], [uh], and also sounds that resemble something in between; a diphthong was also recorded[ie]. It is possible, by the way, that such a diphthong was denoted by the letter “yat” in the Old Russian language.
This point of view was adhered to, for example, by linguists A. A. Shakhmatov and V. V. Vinogradov. A. M. Selishchev did not agree with them, believing that the desired sound was not a diphthong, but a narrow one[uh]. It must be said that vowels are called wide or narrow depending on how wide the mouth opens when pronouncing them. The narrowest vowel in the Russian language is[and], and narrow [uh] partly similar to him in articulation.
So what did “yat” mean? - diphthong or one sound? At present we have to admit that both hypotheses are valid. All the variety of modern sounds in place of the ancient “yat” could have come from a narrow[e], and from the diphthong [ie]. It is impossible to know anything more precisely yet; as linguist L.V. Uspensky noted about this, in IX century there were no tape recorders...
In scientific transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet, as well as in the recording of restored Proto-Slavic words, this “mysterious” vowel is denoted by the Latin sign ě (with a “tick”, or gachek, at the top). It should not be confused with ĕ (with the “arc” denoting brevity): the latter is used to write a reduced[uh], denoted in Cyrillic once the letter b, “er”.
The sound [ě] (ѣ) arose in Proto-Slavic from two main sources :
- an earlier source is from the long vowel *ē, for example:*s ē men > with ѣ me(seed), *d ē dŏs > d ѣ db(grandfather);
- later *ě developed from diphthongs * oi, *ai in the era of the open syllable law:*k oi na > cѣ on(price) *vod ai>water ѣ (water). Most often this happened not in the roots, but in the endings of some word forms.
Sound [ě] was pronounced somewhat differently in Old Russian dialects, and it also disappeared in them at different times. This process began in XV century. In literary Russian, in place[ ě ] began to be pronounced[uh] or: laziness[lʼenʼ], there is, i.e. [ě] and [e] coincided by articulation. This didn't happen before XVIII century. Writing the letter Ѣ has become a tradition that does not reflect live pronunciation.
This fact caused many difficulties when teaching children to spell. Words and forms of words where, according to tradition, the letter Ѣ was written, had to be learned by heart; the list was quite impressive. To make the task easier for students, teachers and methodologists composed mnemonic poems, for example:
“White, damn, damn, damn
Ub e sorry hungry in l s.
R ѣ ѣ о з ѣ з ѣ з ѣ gal,
R ѣ ѣ з хр ѣ nom ѣ gave,
And for the bitter one yes
Let's talk about it!Give me, brother, what a cell and a cell,
R ѣ sieve, r ѣ grid, s ѣ weave,
I want to eat, -
That's how it should be write…"
This passage did not include all the words whose spelling needed to be remembered. The poems were long and poorly connected in meaning. Memorizing similar texts was recognized as not a very successful way of teaching, and some teachers tried to invent other techniques - for example, breaking words from Ѣ into thematic groups for better memorization. However, this method seemed to work even less. There was only one main remedy left - long exercises, repetitions, repeated rewriting of the necessary words.
Of course, this state of affairs made learning difficult and created many difficulties for both students and teachers. At the end XIX – At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was an active discussion in society and scientific circles about the need to simplify Russian spelling. In particular, it was proposed to exclude the letter Ѣ from the alphabet. But spelling reforms rarely meet with the approval of most people. Quite the opposite: there are many who adhere to conservative positions. Some even think that such reforms destroy the language, primitivize it, and tear people away from their ancestral culture and spiritual roots. And at the beginning of the twentieth century, other conservatives also argued that spelling changes were not far from political ones... They saw spelling reform as a harbinger of the destruction of state and spiritual foundations.
However, supporters of the reform were not silent either. For example, candidate of theology A. E. Gorokhov at the end XIX century wrote the article “It’s time to eliminate the letter"yat" from the Russian alphabet." I will give an excerpt from it (in modern spelling):
“It takes a lot of time and work to learn the spelling of a letter« yat"; Meanwhile, this time and labor could be used to acquire useful knowledge. We are especially sad for the children of the primary public school.
They study at school three years, and that’s where their education ends. They have little time, and it is very precious; Why waste a significant portion of time unproductively?..<…>
The letter “yat”, more often than anything else, is the cause of misfortune for students: for inability to use this letter correctly, public school students are deprived of their graduation certificates and are not accepted into lower grades. and secondary educational institutions..."
Academy Special Commission Sciences, created in 1904, prepared a project for spelling reform, but due to the ambiguous (often negative) attitude of society, authorities, scientists and teachers towards it, this project was not implemented in tsarist Russia. It took a change in the government system for the reform to be implemented. The Provisional Government tried to carry it out, but progress was slow. The Bolsheviks finally solved this problem. In 1918, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree “On the introduction of new spelling.” Among the spelling changes, the exclusion of the letter “yat” from the Russian alphabet was indicated.
Literature:
Galinskaya E. A. Historical phonetics of the Russian language.– M., 2009.
Uspensky L.V. According to the law of letters.– M., 1973.
Samsonov N. G. Old Russian language.– M., 1973.
Oldenburg S. F. History of Soviet spelling // Ogonyok. – 1927. – № 44.
Gorokhov A.E. It’s time to eliminate the letter “yat” from the Russian alphabet.– Eagle, 1900.
Kulman N.K. Methodology of the Russian language.– St. Petersburg, 1912.
Illustration: page from the “Primer” by Karion Istomin.
No, it's not true, it's just a very common one myth . Linguists conceived the reform long before October 1917, back in the 19th century. By the way, among the developers of this reform there were people with very different views, not only revolutionary ones.
Several reform projects were proposed in the early years of the 20th century. All of them were considered by the Spelling Commission. But nothing was approved before 1917.
So the Bolsheviks received the reform already fully developed and prepared; all that remained was to implement it, which was done very quickly. That is why the reform has always been presented as a merit of the Soviet government.
Did they really run around the printing houses and confiscate the letters?
This is roughly how it all happened. After the reform was approved, the old symbols disappeared from printing houses. The revolutionaries carefully ensured that no more letters from the past life remained. True, in the revolutionary fervor, those letters that were preserved in the new spelling were also removed from printing houses.
For example, the letter Kommersant (formerly er) disappeared. But in some words it was still necessary! That is why in some words Kommersant began to be replaced with an apostrophe (podezd) - there simply weren’t enough signs.
What ultimately changed?
There have been quite a lot of changes. Firstly, the reform simplified the Russian alphabet - some letters disappeared from it:Ѣ (yat), Ѳ (fita), І (“and decimal”) The hard sign was retained only as a dividing sign. The rule has changed tosalary:now I had to writeWithbefore a voiceless consonant andh- before the call.
Some words began to look different. For example, before the reform they wrote “better”, and after - “better”, before “new”, and then - “new”. And instead of “her” they began to write “her”.
By the way, the text of the reform said nothing about the fate of the letter “Izhitsa”, which was used in some words of Greek origin (ѵpostas). Officially, no one canceled this letter, but it fell out of use on its own, under the influence of general changes.
It is interesting that the steam locomotives of the Izhitsa series were produced until the early 30s, and they were driven right up to the 50s.
What is written at the end of words, as in the name “Kommersant”, is often called yatem. This is right?
No, this is a mistake. The letter "yat" looked completely different. Like this:Ѣ. Yat was written where we now write E, for example, in the word “Veera (faith).” Pronunciation of lettersE and Ѣ were different then.
An example of illiterate use of the letter yat. Photo: Nicolay Sidorov / Wikimedia
Ѣ remained part of the Russian alphabet until the reform in 1918. It became a symbol not just of the old spelling, but also of the old system as a whole: yat was used by the white intelligentsia. Many emigrant publications retained this letter until the Second World War.
Newspaper "Russia" (New York, USA) using pre-reform spelling
By the way, it is interesting that this letter has been endangered more than once. They wanted to abolish it back inXVIII century. In particular, V.K. Trediakovsky proposed to get rid of the yat, but M.V. Lomonosov objected to him. Later, linguists began to note that the pronunciation of E and Ѣ no longer makes any difference and the letter is most likely not needed. However, no decisions were made.
Then Nicholas I returned to the question, but the matter never went further than reflection. In 1911, the Imperial Academy of Sciences prepared a draft spelling reform, but Nicholas II froze it. The letter “yat” was saved again, and the schoolchildren continued to suffer, memorizing mnemonic verses:
Demons, canopy, chains, vezha,
Left, some, fresh, whole.
Children are light! Get sick less often!
He knew how to captivate the Pechenegs...
What is more logical in pre-reform spelling than in the current one?
We asked this question to linguists.
Vladimir Pakhomov
To the editor-in-chief of Gramota.ru Vladimir Pakhomov, for example, the letters “er” and “er” (the current hard and soft signs) are missing. The fact is that in pre-reform spelling, any word ending in a consonant (except Y, which was considered a vowel letter) had a hard or soft sign after this consonant:house, volume, knife, doctor, ball, horse, steppe, night, rye, mouse. The word could end with either a vowel orъ, or b.
“There was harmony, systematicity and consistency in this,” says Vladimir Pakhomov. - After it was removedъat the end of the words, it collapsed: we began to writehouse, tom, knife, doctor, ball, night, rye, mouse. By this I in no way want to say thatъat the end of the words they removed it in vain. On the contrary: it was worth being consistent and removing (as linguists have suggested many times)bat the end of words after hissing words too, because it does not carry any phonetic load here. The soft sign would remain only as an indicator of the softness of the consonant (horse, steppe), that is, it would be used in its main function. We would writeknife And face, ball And night,and systematicity and harmony would remain here.”
Alexander Piperski
And to the linguist Alexandru Piperski the pre-reform rules that apply to consoles seem more logicalwithout-, through- and through- . Now we write “immoral”, but “sleepless”, that is, in some words there is deafening, andh changes to With. And before all these prefixes ended inh.
“It was logical,” explains Alexander Piperski, “because we usually respect the principle of morpheme unity and do not change spelling due to automatic changes in sound: we write “sign” (as in “put”), and not “podpisat” (as it sounds ); “to depart” (as in “to postpone”), and not “to depart” (as it sounds).”
Alexey Shmelev
The decision to get rid of the letter “yat” also seems not entirely logical to him: “The presenceѣ , of course, made memorizing vocabulary words more difficult, but there were fewer cases when it was not clear whether to read [e] or [o] (or, in terms of modern letters, “e” or “e”). For example, “everything” is “everything” (plural), and “all” is “everything” (cf. singular gender)
When yat was removed and the letteredid not make it mandatory, as in Belarusian, this created a number of such difficulties:(she) sat down And villages (villages)».
In turn, the Chairman of the Orthographic Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexey Shmelev believes that the “logical” parameter is not the main one in assessing writing rules: “It is important for newly created writing systems, and for languages with a long written tradition it is more important not to interrupt it. A break with the old written tradition has already occurred, and most literate speakers of the Russian language are closer to the current spelling; It would be good to at least preserve it.”
Ѣ , ѣ (Name: yat, a masculine word) is a letter of the historical Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabet, now used only in the Church Slavonic language.
Letter shape
The origin of the Glagolitic form “yatya” does not have a satisfactory explanation (the main versions: modified capital alpha (Α) or some ligatures), nor the Cyrillic one (usually they indicate connections with the Cyrillic and, as well as with the cross-shaped Glagolitic form of the letter. In the oldest Cyrillic in inscriptions (especially of Serbian origin) there is a symmetrical outline of yat in the form of Δ under an inverted T or under a cross; later the standard form Ѣ became the most widespread; sometimes the horizontal crossing line received a very long serif on the left, and the segments to the right and upward from the intersection were shortened and could disappear altogether. ; the ultimate form of this change was the outline. ѣ like a fused Gb, which became in the 19th century. main in handwritten and italic fonts, but sometimes found in straight font, especially in headlines, posters, etc. If an L-shaped letter is found in a medieval text, then it can be either yat or ep (b).
Evolution of the sound content of the letter Ѣ
The question of the sound of yatya in the Proto-Slavic language is debatable. Scientists, to a certain extent, are perplexed by the wide range of sounds into which yat passed in Slavic languages - from ӓ to i. The father of Slavic comparative linguistics A. Kh. Vostokov found it difficult to determine the exact sound of yat; F.I. Buslaev saw it as a simple long e, but supporters of this theory turned out to be few; F. F. Fortunatov saw in it a diphthong ie, Pedersen - a wide monophthong ӓ, while other scientists saw an open diphthong of type ia. The ESBE states that Ѣ was pronounced /æ/. Finally, there is an opinion that this sound was pronounced differently in different dialects and even within one dialect, for example, in the place of the former Indo-European long e and former diphthongs. It is noted, in particular, that the Latin name for the vegetable rapa passed into the Proto-Slavic language and from it into modern Slavic languages in the form of turnip. In a number of the oldest Finnish borrowings from Russian, yat is also transmitted through ӓ, ӓӓ (which, however, may already reflect the peculiarities of the dialect of Novgorod Slovenes). However, in the Old Russian language, apparently, already in ancient times, yat began to be pronounced closed, that is, close to our modern E, which is why it coincided over time with either E or I (for example, in the Ukrainian language, in Novgorod dialects). In the Moscow dialect, which became normative, yat was pronounced as . A reminder of this today is, on the one hand, the transfer of the name of the capital of Austria Wien as Vienna (Vienna), on the other hand, the European spelling of the word “council” as “soviet” (yat was transmitted in Latin through ie and after it coincided in pronunciation with E).
- in Russian and Belarusian [ ] in the language yat in sound coincided with “e” (Russian. bread, bread; Belor. bread), however, unlike “e”, under stress very rarely turned into “e” (examples of such exceptions are the words stars, blossomed etc., see illustration);
- in Ukrainian - with “i” ( bread, bread);
- in Bulgarian - c “I” ( abyss) or "e" ( bread);
- in Serbo-Croatian - in different ways, depending on the dialect, which is also reflected in the writing ( bread - bread - bread; the first version is the main one in Serbia, the second - in Croatia and Montenegro, the third is not considered literary);
- in Polish yat becomes "a" before t, d, n, s, z, ł, r and in “e” in all other cases (the preceding consonant is also softened): biały: bielić, wiara: wierzyć, źrebię, brzeg, miesiąc, las: leśny, lato: letni, świeca.
However, the letter yat remained after this merger:
- in Serbia yat (“јат”) disappeared with the transition to “vukovica” in the first half of the 19th century;
- in Montenegro this new alphabet was adopted in 1863;
- in Russia it was abolished by the reforms of 1917-1918. ;
- in Bulgaria yat (“e double”) was abolished twice: first in 1921, but after the 1923 coup the old spelling was returned; and then finally in 1945.
In Ukrainian writing, in the 19th - early 20th centuries, yat was found only in a few early versions (in the Maksimovich system it was written etymologically, that is, in almost the same places as in Russian, but read as “i”; and in the so-called “eryzhka”, encoding Ukrainian pronunciation using letters of the Russian alphabet, yat after consonants denoted a softening “e” ( blue sea, they are writing now blue sea), and at the beginning of words and after vowels it corresponded to the current iotized “ї” or (less often) “є”.
yat had a special use in medieval Bosnian writing (bosančice): there it denoted either the sound [y], or, when placed before N and L, the softness of these consonants (in the same function as the Italian G in combinations gn And gl); at the same time, yat was interchangeable with the letter derv (Ћ), which was similar in shape.
Disappearance of Ѣ from Russian pronunciation and writing
Mnemonic verses for ease of memorization ѣ
I will mix the sowing into the measure,
I'm going to confess my sin.
Copper and iron captivated everyone,
Dnieper, Dniester to visit.
Acquired, blossomed, little bird,
Weight, April, success saddle,
see, gap, milestone, rarely,
Tell your neighbor aptly
Strong, the nut has sung well...
Demons, canopy, chains, vezha,
Left, some, fresh, whole.
Children are light! Get sick less often!
He knew how to captivate the Pechenegs...
In 17th-century texts, yat is sometimes mixed with E in an unstressed position, but never under stress. The unconditional preservation of yat after Peter’s alphabet reform in 1708 indicates that the pronunciation of the letters E and Ѣ was still distinguishable then. A contemporary and peer of Peter, Fyodor Polikarpov writes that Ѣ “makes a voice” “and so on in its own way.” He further notes that the letter was introduced to denote "the subtlest from the letter<буквы>e pronunciation" and that it stands for the diphthong ie: “this is placed after the last, and the i under it is slightly separated and connected in a face-like manner: ie”
However, in the 18th century, the pronunciation of yatya rapidly converged with e, and V.K. Tredyakovsky was the first to propose abolishing this letter as unnecessary. M.V. Lomonosov objected to him, pointing out that “the letters E and Ѣ in common parlance barely have a sensitive difference, which in reading the ear very clearly separates and requires<…>in E plumpness, in Ѣ subtlety.” D.I. Yazykov, born 8 years after Lomonosov’s death, no longer saw any difference in the pronunciation of the two letters. He wrote: “The letter “ѣ”, having lost its real pronunciation, is like an ancient stone lying out of place, which everyone stumbles over and does not take it aside only because it is ancient and was once needed for a building.” .
In ordinary consciousness, the reform (and the abolition of yat, as its most striking point) was firmly connected with the affairs of the Bolsheviks, so that the letter “ѣ” became almost a symbol of the white intelligentsia (in fact, among the supporters of its abolition who participated in the development of the 1911 project, there were many representatives of right-wing academic circles, including member of the Union of the Russian People, Academician A. I. Sobolevsky). The vast majority of emigrant publications (except for Trotskyist ones, etc.) were printed in the old way until the Second World War, and a small part of them retained the pre-reform spelling after it, until the end of the twentieth century (especially in books from church publishing houses).
According to critics of the reform, the abolition of the letter “yat” caused certain damage to the readability of the Russian text:
- yat was one of the few letters that graphically broke the monotony of the line;
- with the abolition of yatya, many words from different roots with E and Ѣ became homonyms: there is(“eat food”) and There is(singular part 3rd person of the verb “to be”), I'm flying(by air) and I'm flying(of people), blue And blue, vision And management, and so on.; These coincidences are partially compensated by the placement (if necessary) of accents and dots over the E: everything"All" - All"All".
Letter Ѣ today
Russian language
Bulgarian language
After linguistic reforms, instead of Ѣ, I or E began to be written in various words. A characteristic feature is the difference between the dialects: in Western Bulgaria, instead of Ѣ, E is always pronounced, in Eastern Bulgaria - both E and Y. In modern Bulgaria, the letter yat is also pronounced as in Russia, they are sometimes used on various antique signs, and, as in Russia, they often do it illiterately.
Rules for using the letter ѣ in pre-reform Russian orthography
Mnemonic verses with ѣ
White, pale, poor demon
The hungry man ran away into the forest.
He ran through the woods,
Had radish and horseradish for lunch
And for that bitter dinner
I vowed to cause trouble.
Know, brother, that cage and cage,
Sieve, lattice, mesh,
Vezha and iron with yat, -
This is how it should be written.
Our eyelids and eyelashes
The pupils protect the eyes,
Eyelids squint for a whole century
At night, every person...
The wind broke the branches,
The German knitted brooms,
Hanged correctly when changing,
I sold it for two hryvnia in Vienna.
Dnieper and Dniester, as everyone knows,
Two rivers in close proximity,
The Bug divides their regions,
It cuts from north to south.
Who is angry and furious there?
Do you dare to complain so loudly?
We need to resolve the dispute peacefully
And convince each other...
It’s a sin to open up bird’s nests,
It’s a sin to waste bread in vain,
It’s a sin to laugh at a cripple,
To mock the crippled...
Prof. N.K. Kulman. Methodology of the Russian language. - 3rd ed. - St. Petersburg. : published by Y. Bashmakov and Co., 1914. - P. 182.
The letter Ѣ is written:
- in the suffix of the comparative and superlative degrees of adjectives and adverbs -ee (-ee), - the greatest: stronger, stronger, the strongest, strongest(but not as a final letter: deeper, better, stronger, cheaper, with the exception of abbreviated forms more, me, share, heavier);
- in the dative and prepositional cases of singular nouns: about the table, (about) Anna, about the sea, about happiness(and about happiness), but in no case in the nominative and accusative cases ( go(e)m (where?) to the sea, But let's go (where?) to the sea);
- in three forms of personal pronouns: me, to you, to yourself;
- in the instrumental case of pronouns by whom, than(but in the prepositional what about), so, everyone(but in the prepositional about everything), as well as in all plural cases of pronouns those And everything(writing All means All);
- in the feminine plural pronoun they;
- in the numeral two and its derivatives: two hundred, twelfth;
- in all cases of plural feminine numerals alone And both: alone, alone, alone, both, both, both;
- in the console no- undefined (not negative) value: someone, something, no one, several, never(meaning “unknown when”, and negative once= “no time”), some etc.;
- in adverbs and prepositions where, outside, here, now, after, except, isn't it, everywhere, near, near, how long, split, hitherto, from here, inde, evil and their derivatives: current, pitch-black, local, from outside and so on.;
- in complex prepositions and adverbs formed from a noun whose case required Ѣ: together, like, in the distance, doubly and so on.;
- written in verbs -there are(three exceptions: kick, rub), die and prefixes from them): have, want, watch, get sick, blush and so on.; this yat is preserved during conjugation and word formation: have - I have - had - having - having - estate;
- but in adjective forms like visible or sick is written e, since instead of a verb suffix they have -ѣ- adjective suffix -en- with fluent e ( visible, sick);
- similarly, formations like clairvoyant, seat(checked by forms with a fluent vowel: clairvoyant, Sydney);
- in nouns it happens like -yeah, so -enie, and yat is written only when formed from a verb to -there are (darken - darken, But darken - darken);
- in about a hundred separate roots, a list of which had to be remembered (listed in the article “Yat in pre-reform Russian orthography”), for which schoolchildren used specific verses.
In some cases, more or less general rules were used: for example, yat was almost never written in non-Slavic roots, in the presence of a test word with “ё” ( honey - honey) and as a fluent vowel ( flax - flax).
Comparison with other Slavic languages
There is an easy way to check where you need to write ѣ even without knowing the rules. If the letter E of a Russian word when translated into Ukrainian changes to І, it means that in pre-revolutionary orthography it was most likely written ѣ. For example: b і liy - b ѣ ly, feces і ka - kal ѣ ka. However, E in a closed syllable could also turn into i: kam і n - kam e n, n і h - n e whose. In the southern monuments of the Old Russian language, cases of writing ѣ in this position, the so-called “new yat”, are recorded.
In Polish spelling, the former yat corresponds to combinations of letters ia or ie: b iały - b ѣ ly, b ie lić - b ѣ pour; m ie jsce - m ѣ one hundred, m ia sto - city. For this reason, before the revolution in Polish proper names ie transmitted through ѣ: Sierakowski - Sѣrakovskiy.
In the Czech language, the letter yatu corresponds to .
In the Iekavian dialect of the Serbo-Croatian language, yatyu corresponds to the letter combination ije/je: b ije la - b ѣ barking, ml ije ko - milk (ml ѣ ko ), m je sto - m ѣ hundred, etc.
Reports and messages on the Russian language
On topic: HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE
At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter I carried out a reform of the alphabet. Difficult to write letters were replaced by the so-called civil script. We still use this type of letters with minor modifications.
“Under Peter the Great,” M. Lomonosov jokingly wrote, “not only the boyars and boyars, but also the letters threw off their wide fur coats (he meant the old Slavic font) and dressed up in summer clothes.” By summer clothes, the scientist meant a new civil alphabet.
In 1917-1918, another language reform took place - the letters yat, izhitsa, fita and er at the end of the word were excluded from the Russian alphabet. What were these letters and why were they expelled from the alphabet?
Letter YAT
The letter yat is similar in design to the icon that astronomers use to represent the planet Saturn: ℏ). The letters ѣ and е were pronounced exactly the same. Compare: evening - wind. In the word evening they wrote e, and in the word wind - ѣ. You will probably agree that such difficulties brought schoolchildren a lot of grief. The letter yat was called the “scarecrow letter”, “horror letter”. The students had to mechanically memorize the rules “on the fly.” Mistakes that were “not good” were considered the most terrible. The expression that emerged at that time was known to everyone: to know in yat - it meant “to know something in the best possible way.”
Letter IZHITSA
The letter Izhitsa looked like the Roman numeral for five - V - and somewhat resembled an inverted whip. This is where the expression “prescribe Izhitsa” came from, which meant “to flog, tear out”, and in a broader sense - “to give someone a hard time, to give someone a strong scolding.” And, try, even if you are afraid of a good scolding, to determine in which words to write which letter! Here are 3 words in front of you:
Peace - "silence, calmness"
world - "universe"
myro - “fragrant substance”.
The first syllable of all 3 words is pronounced the same, but depending on the meaning of the word in writing, it was indicated by 3 different letters. In the first word they wrote the letter and (mir), in the second - and with a dot (mir), and in the third - izhitsa (mvro). And although there were many difficulties and confusion, Izhitsa was canceled very soon. In 1828, A. Pushkin published an epigram on the editor of the journal “Bulletin of Europe” M. Kochenovsky, who persistently restored Izhitsa in all texts (although, in the opinion of many, it was high time to exclude it from the Russian alphabet):
Fool, turning his back to the sun,
Under the cold "Messenger"
Sprinkled dead water
I splashed the Izhitsa alive.
But the letter still existed in the alphabet until the reform of 1917-1918.
Letter FITA
The letters f and fita were in different places in the alphabet, but they were pronounced exactly the same. In the pre-revolutionary directory "All Petrograd" people with the surname Fedorov were placed in various places: some - with the letter f, others - with fita. Why? But because the surname Fedorov could be written in different ways: both through f and through fita.
In 1748, V. Trediakovsky wrote in the article “Conversation about Spelling”: “Why bother and waste time uselessly just to know where to write fitu and where f? Not everyone from us studied Greek, or Latin, or any other language, without knowledge of which it is impossible to know the differences in these letters."
Letter EP
The letter er (ъ), the so-called hard sign, is now considered a useful letter. It always does the same job: it separates the consonant of the prefix from the vowel (rise, detour). And before the reform of 1917-1918, the hard sign was written at the end of words after hard consonants, for example: dom, oak, rode, gorod.
As many times as they called him: “idler”, “idler”, “parasite”, “robber”, “bloodsucker”! And indeed, this letter at the end of the word consumed more than 8% of the time and paper.
L. Uspensky in the book “A Word about Words” writes that in only one pre-revolutionary edition (before the language reform) of L. Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace” there are 115 thousand idler letters on 2080 pages, and if all the letters er are collected in one place and printed in a row at the end of the last volume, they would take up 70-odd pages.
How much will it be with a circulation of 10 thousand copies? And if you also imagine that at that time it took approximately 100 working days to type up “War and Peace”, then 3.5 days of that time the typesetters, for some unknown reason, typed only hard characters.
And how much extra paper was wasted! This bum letter was the most expensive letter in the world.
“Reports and messages on the Russian language” V. A. Krutetskaya. Additional materials, useful information, interesting facts. Elementary School.
