Two Short Articles on Russian Orthography
I just read these tonight, and thought they may be of interest to some of you. Nothing really shocking (well, except the alleged Hebrew influence -- I know very little abou the topic, but I'd never heard this before), but it's a quick overview. Besides, I'm sure TATY will have some sage remarks to offer up! I'm going to post twice, to keep the articles separate. Sorry in advance if I'm clogging it up too much.
RUSSIAN LANGUAGE: FOCUS ON ORTHOGRAPHY
11. A POTTED HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN ALPHABET
The Russian alphabet now has 32 letters -- or 33 if you allow "yo" to count as a separate letter. (1) It is the end product of successive reforms of the "Cyrillic" alphabet attributed to St. Cyril, a 10th-century missionary from Byzantium. (2)
Cyril relied mainly on the Greek alphabet. Even today it is easy enough to spot most of the Russian letters that have their origin in Greek. Even those letters that look as though they might come from Latin mostly come from Greek (e.g. K -- kappa, P -- rho, T -- tau). But Greek letters could not be found for certain sounds in Slavic speech, and so there was SOME input from Latin, including a letter looking like S (for the sound "dz") that was later abolished by Peter the Great.
There was also some input from Hebrew, which before Cyril had been widely used to transliterate Slavic languages under the cultural influence of the Judaized Khazars. In particular, the resemblance between the Cyrillic "sh" and the Hebrew letter shem is unmistakable (3 vertical lines joined at the bottom). The voiced counterpart to "sh" -- "zh," one of the letters apparently invented by Cyril -- looks like an adaptation of "sh" (with the outer lines bent inward). Later Peter added a hook to "sh" to make "shch"; so since then there have been 3 Russian letters that have their origin in Hebrew.
The first great reform of the Russian alphabet was that carried out by Peter in 1708-10. Several letters, including the Greek xi, psi, and omega, were dropped and the form of others simplified. The Russian Academy of Sciences introduced further changes in 1735, 1738, and 1758.
The second great reform came in 1917, following long and bitter controversy. (3) It can be regarded as the joint work of the Provisional and Soviet governments, both of which issued key documents specifying the content of the reform. (4) Another 4 letters were eliminated. One of them was the Greek theta (Russian doesn't have the sound "th"), turning "orthografiya" (orthography) into "orfografiya." Use of the hard sign was abolished at the end of words, but retained in the middle of words where required to indicate that a consonant is hard not soft. Some further minor modifications to spelling rules followed during the Soviet period.
NOTES
(1) See RAS No. 25, item 13.
(2) To see the Russian alphabet as it existed at various times in history, go to http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cyrillic.htm
(3) The source gives detailed information about the course of debate and the alternative schemes proposed in the decades leading up to 1917.
(4) Circulars of the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment dated May and June 1917, a decree of the Council of People's Commissars in October 1917, and a decree of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment in December 1917. The source for the following item reproduces all these and other documents.
