The article gives an overview of the orthographic reform of the Cyrillic alphabet put in place after the 1917 Russian revolution.Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Cente

Greenberg, Marc L.

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Russian Orthographic Reform – Open Educational Resourceshttps://oer.ku.edu/russian/orthography/[2022-01-06 10:50:42]  Russian  Russian Orthographic Reform OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCESIn the HumanitiesChinese (10)English (1)Foreign Language (1)French (1)German (7)Italian (3)Literature (10)Quichua (3)Russian (17)Spanish (5)Swahili (1)Turkish (1)Ukrainian (2)Uyghur (10)article articolo audio Bilig Deutsche Grammarfon grammar h5p holidays hujambo italian konuşanparagraflar lecture le pont literature politics quizlet Russian seminar traditions ukrainian video vocabulary 1919 propaganda posterissued by White General PetrNikolaevich Vrangel’. Thecaption reads “Why aren’tyou in the army?” in pre-revolutionary orthography.Russian Orthographic Reform  MARC L. GREENBERG    JULY 26, 2011   RUSSIANThe Writing on the Wall:The Russian Orthographic Reformof 1917–1918The sweeping notional and social changes brought by theRussian Revolution required a program for the rapidpromotion of mass literacy. Despite Leninist appeals to raisethe level of literacy in all (130+) languages of the SovietUnion, Russian, the lingua franca of the Tsarist Empire,remained the main vehicle for all-union communication andthe primary means of building Soviet identity. While alllanguages, even those with no written tradition, were tobecome standardized to a greater or lesser degree in duecourse—socialist in content, national in form— expandingRussian literacy was a top priority for the new, Bolshevikleaders of the multilingual empire. From the revolutionaries’perspective the first step towards revolutionizing minds wasto streamline the written form of the Russian word.Contrived in the medieval period, the Russian orthographicsystem’s Bulgaro-Macedonian inheritance impeded literacy,a hindrance well understood for at least a century prior tothe Revolution. From a cost-benefit viewpoint, theorthographic forms meant economies of scale: the reductionof redundant signs gener ted sa ings in metal type,typesetting labor, ink, and paper.Russian writing was no stranger to reform and revolution. Writing in the Slavic languages beganin the second half of the ninth century AD thanks to the efforts of Byzantine missionaries. In aradical departure from the exclusive use of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek for holy texts, Cyril andMethodius devised a new alphabet which enabled the use of the Slavic vernacular 700 years priorto Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German. As Christianization spread in theCATEGORIESTAGSRussian Orthographic Reform – Open Educational Resourceshttps://oer.ku.edu/russian/orthography/[2022-01-06 10:50:42]Famous 1920 Red Armyposter by Dmitrii StakhevichOrlov (D. Moor) with thecaption ‘Have youvolunteered?’ written in thenew Soviet orthography.following centuries, the Cyrillic alphabet, patterned after an earlier alphabet, Glagolitic, butrendering roughly the same letter-phoneme correspondences in Greek uncial letters andmodifications of them for specifically Slavic sounds, was inherited by East Slavs. So, for example,Glagolitic , , , , ,   became Cyrillic (corresponding to modernRussian а, б, в, г, д, е, ж and the phonemes /a, b, v, g, d, e, ž/). Subsequently, the Cyrillic alphabetunderwent gradual evolution, adapting partially to East Slavic sound changes, but also remainingin some many respects faithful to tradition. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, efforts weremade to reintroduce Bulgaro-Macedonian orthographic practices into Russian, which retardedthis evolutionary process to a degree. (See Appendix 1 on the medieval archaisms in Russianorthography.)The first abrupt change in Cyrillic came with Peter I’s (1672–1725) introduction of the ‘civil type’(гражданскиий  шрифт), which abandoned the florid calligraphy of the medieval tradition andaligned Russian letters with the new typefaces used in Western Europe. This reform was aresponse to the need to fix the shape of letters to be used in the movable-type printing press(introduced into Russia in the second half of the sixteenth century), as well as to streamline thealphabet for use in the growing number of secular texts. These changes would be graduallyadopted in other Slavic languages using the Cyrillic alphabet.Although reforms of the orthography had been discussed andadvanced incrementally from Peter’s time to the earlytwentieth century, implementation of a complete reformawaited the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The changes wereintroduced via decree by the People’s Commissariat forEducation of December 23, 1917 and took effect with adecree of the Council of People’s Commissars of October 10,1918. The reforms corresponded with the shift away frompreoccupation with historical-comparativism and a focus onIndo-European origins of Russian (and other Europeanlanguages) to a rising concern with language structure anddescription, apperception of the social function of language,the study of language as a system of signs and, in particular,the recognition of the phoneme, the meaning-distinguishingunit of sound. Among the proponents of the reform was therenowned linguist J. N. Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929),a fundamental figure in the development of structurallinguistics.The orthographic reform was intended to facilitate rapid andwidespread acquisition of literacy among Russian speakers, both native speakers of Russian andspeakers of Russian as a second-language, state subjects of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks’challenge was to inculcate socialist ideology to a population that was highly stratified with arelatively small literate elite and a vast underclass of peasants and workers with little to noliteracy. These, moreover, spoke varieties of Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian that werelinguistically distinct from the literary language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Additionally, TsaristRussian Orthographic Reform – Open Educational Resourceshttps://oer.ku.edu/russian/orthography/[2022-01-06 10:50:42]attempts to acculturate non-Russians to Russian speech had been only partially successful, aprocess that was not yet fully complete even at the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.Just as Peter had recognized almost two centuries earlier that the streamlining andwesternization of the written language was essential to building a civil state on western models,the Bolsheviks saw language and the written medium as keys to forming a national and collectiveidentity, homo sovieticus, and a new classless state.Although the reform of the orthography would be criticized on ideological grounds by émigrégroups and, after the collapse of the USSR in Russia proper, as a perversion of historical traditioncommitted by the Bolsheviks, the general outlines of the reform were already widely agreed uponin the nineteenth century. The last phase of attempts to reform the orthography began in earnestin 1862, in the period of Alexander II’s Great Reforms. The process pitted traditionalists, whosupported Ia. K. Grot’s (1812–1893) orthography against reformists, who saw the archaisms ofthe old orthography as a drag on literacy and learning. The Russian linguist A. A. Shakhmatov(1864–1920), an early structuralist, viewed the reform as a continuation of the Cyrillo-Methodiantradition, given that the initial impulse to create a Slavic writing system was to render speechfaithfully in writing as part of a living tradition. In view of this, the period of the “correction ofbooks” (исправление книг) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had reintroduced alienarchaisms into the writing system, in effect distancing it from living Russian; the reform wouldthus bring the orthography better in line with the living language in the spirit of Cyril andMethodius’ project. Broadly speaking, what was perceived as a revolutionary act was, in fact, thereassertion of an evolutionary process.BibliographyComrie, Bernard, Gerald Stone, and Maria Polinsky. 1996. The Russian Language in the 20thCentury. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Cracraft, James. 2004. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture. Cambridge: Belknap.Smith, Michael G. 1998. Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR 1917–1953 (= Contributions to the Sociology of Language 80). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Appendix 1: Letter replacement andmorphological adjustmentsLetters that had lost their sound-distinguishing functionOldLetterReplacedbyReason for the replacementѢ, ѣ Е, е The letter Ѣ in medieval Russian had signaled a diphthong /ie/, whichsubsequently merged with the vowel /e/, which in turn had been writtenwith the letter Е. Once the merger was completed, Russian speakers had tolearn by rote which words contain Ѣ (е.g., ѣсть ‘to eat’/jest’/, бѣлъ ‘white’ /b’el/) and which ЕRussian Orthographic Reform – Open Educational Resourceshttps://oer.ku.edu/russian/orthography/[2022-01-06 10:50:42](e.g., есть ‘is’/jest’/, меньше ‘less’ /m’en’še/). The elimination of thearchaic letter removed an over-specification in rendering Russian vowelcontrasts.ъ [Ø] In medieval Russian, the letter ъ signaled the sound /ə/, whichsubsequently disappeared. Nevertheless, the letter continued to be writtenconsistently at the end of all words ending in a non-palatalized consonant,e.g., въ словахъ ‘in words’ /v slovax/, долженъ ‘must’ /dolžen/.Removing the sign at the end of a word resulted in a loss of redundancy,viz. → в словах, должен. When this sound followed a consonant andpreceded the sound /j/, the letter was preserved in the new orthographyto signal the presence of a meaning-distinguishing /j/, e.g., съесть ‘to eatup’ /sjest’/ (≠ сесть ‘to sit’ /s’est’/). This was the only remaining contextin which the letter was still written up to the Revolution and it waspreserved by the rule removing only word-final ъ.Non-functional letters carried over from GreekOldLetterReplacedbyReason for the replacementІ, і И, и The distinction between І and И was functional in Greek, but it had neverreferred to a systematic sound contrast in Russian (a phonological contrastwas assigned to them, however, in Ukrainian). In the nineteenth centurythe sign І (“десятеричное,” as opposed to И “восьмеричное,” followingthe numerical values of the letters in the Church Slavic tradition) waswritten before another vowel letter or й. It was also used to differentiatevisually homophonic words, e.g., миръ ‘peace’ ≠ міръ ‘world’.Ө, ө Ф, ф This letter was used to render the letter theta in borrowings from Greek.Russian lacks the interdental fricative /θ/, so it was pronounced as /f/, forwhich reason it was also replaced by the letter for this sound, Ф,e.g., Өедоръ ‘Theodore’ → Федор (or Фёдор).Ѵ, ѵ В or И This letter occurred only in Greek borrowings, corresponding to classicalGreek short /u/ and Byzantine Greek /y/. In Russian after the reform itwas replaced by И when it denoted a vowel, as В when it denoted aconsonant, e.g., еѵангеліе → евангелие ‘gospel’; Еѵфимій →Евфимий ‘Euthymius’; ѵподіаконъ ‘subdeacon’ → иподиакон.Morphological adjustmentsThe prefixes без‑, вз‑, из‑, низ‑, раз‑, роз‑, чрез-, and через- would henceforth berendered бес‑, вс‑, ис‑, нис‑, рас‑, рос‑, чрес‑, and черес- before voiceless consonants,Russian Orthographic Reform – Open Educational Resourceshttps://oer.ku.edu/russian/orthography/[2022-01-06 10:50:42]e.g., черезчуръ ‘excessively’ → чересчур. Though this brought Russian spelling more in linewith pronunciation, the principle was not extended to other prefixes (or other morphemes),e.g., отбить ‘to chop off’ did not become *одбить, though the word was pronounced/odb’it’/.The masculine and neuter genitive singular endings of adjectives, spelled in Church Slavictradition as -аго, ‑яго, were henceforth to be written -ого, ‑‑его. This reform recognized acenturies-old change in Russian that extendedthe pronominal endings to the adjective, butfailed to take the final step and recognize the change of -g- to -v- in this morpheme,e.g., бѣлаго ‘of something white’ → белого /b’elava/.The feminine and neuter nominative plural endings, also a relic of Church Slavic tradition,were no longer to be written -ыя, ‑ия, but now ‑ые, ‑ие, e.g., бѣлыя → белые. This broughtthe writing of the plural adjective in line with its morphological development, which hadduring the late medieval period eliminated gender distinctions in the plural.Adjustments were made to Church Slavic spellings of personal pronouns that did notcorrespond to Russian spoken usage, e.g., the feminine plural personal pronoun онѣ → они;the feminine singular accusative/genitive pronoun ея → ее (or её).Appendix 2 : The effect of the reform onRussian textHere are three versions of the text of a letter by the writer I. S. Turgenev recalling the Ukrainianwriter T. G. Shevchenko. The original letter is given in the old orthography. Using MicrosoftWord’s track changes function, we can see at a glance the editorial changes that would be made toa typical stretch of text. In the third text, we see the “changes accepted,” which results in a shortertext, largely due to the removal of the redundant final ъ. This results in a reduction of 281 of 6,721characters (not counting spaces) for a final character count of 6,440 or 4.2%.Download original textDownload text with changes trackedDownload reformed textSourceTurgenev, Ivan S. 1876. И. С. Тургеневъ († 1883 г.) Воспоминанія о Т. Г. Шевченко.(Источникъ: Споминки про Шевченка И. С. Тургенева. // Т. Г. Шевченко. Кобзарь з додаткомспоминок про Шевченка писателів Тургенева і Полонского. — У Празі: Nákladem knihkupectvíídra Grégra a Ferd. Dattla, 1876. — С. III-VIII.) Русскiй Порталъ. Русскіе классики XVIII – нач.XX вв. въ староий  орѳографіи http://lib.russportal.ru/index.php?id=authors.turgenev.turgenev1876_01_0001  [Accessed 24 November 2010]PREVIOUS POSTM.A. Bulgakov’s “Future Prospects” and“In the Café”NEXT POSTRecovering Foreign Language Study forthe Humanities Through CurricularRussian Orthographic Reform – Open Educational Resourceshttps://oer.ku.edu/russian/orthography/[2022-01-06 10:50:42]Thinking: Reflections on Challenges,Principles, and OpportunitiesThe content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If any author elects a different license, the author’slicense takes precedence.2017 | Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center

Russian Orthographic Reform

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Russian Orthographic Reform

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