How to write correctly in Old Russian? Damned letter "yat" March 26th, 2010
Music is playing on the ship...: Decorate yourself with greater glory, you have beaten Mohammed!
For those who were just beginning to learn to read and write, replacing the letter “yat” with “e” was undoubtedly (undoubtedly!) the most joyful result. Writing in Russian has become easier. If you hear "e" - write "e".
In pre-revolutionary spelling, the spelling of the letter “yat” was not at all obvious. There was, of course, general rule: when changing the word, “e” turns into “e” or “b” (“calf” -> “heifer”, “lion” -> “lion cub”), but “e” does not turn. But this rule did not cover the entire variety of words with the letter “yat”. Therefore, it was considered best to simply remember all the words that are written with this malicious letter.
The high school students who reached the age composed a poem composed only of such words. The poem begins like this:
White, pale, poor demon
The hungry man ran away into the forest.
He ran through the forest like a squirrel,
Had radish and horseradish for lunch
And for that bitter lunch
I vowed to cause trouble.
This work was quite long and included all the main roots in which the problem letter should be written. Still a help, although not a big one. But still, dictations in the gymnasium were a curse for those who did not have a good visual memory and did not immediately remember the spelling of the word they read.
However, those high school students who knew the Ukrainian language (or the “Little Russian dialect,” as they used to say at that time) had a chance to get a higher grade than their peers who did not have such knowledge. The fact is that in the Old Church Slavonic language the letter “yat” denoted a special sound, something like “ye” in today’s transcription. During the development of the Russian language, this sound turned into “e”. In the Ukrainian language it became the sound “i” (which is now denoted by the letter i). So, if the corresponding Ukrainian word contains i, write “ѣ” in Russian and you won’t be mistaken. Bily = white.
Polish could also help. In it, “yatyu” most often corresponded to the sound “I”: “star” - “gwiazda”, “place” - “miasto” (in Polish this is “city”, but the common roots are obvious). In a word, history repeated itself once again, when the “foreigners” could write Russian more literately than the Great Russians.
The letter “yat” was written in such small, but very in the right words, as no, where, two (which means two hundred and twelve), everything, both, here. The names of the rivers Dnieper, Dniester and Neman were written through “yat”. Several names of Greek origin were also written with “yate”: Alexey, Gleb, Sergey and the biblical names Eremey, Matvey, Elisha. The name of the Yenisei River, although it rhymed with the last name, was still written with an “e”.
By the way, it was also written with ѣ. It meant Slavic folk wind musical instrument, consisting of seven tubes. The Greeks also had such an instrument. They called it "Pan's pipe."
“Yat” was also included in the endings of verbs (“boil”, “see”, “heat”) and prefixes in indefinite pronouns: “someone”, “something”, “some”. But there were many exceptions here too. So poor high school students had to get a lot of grades and grades in order to learn Russian literacy. They said correctly in the old days: “The letter “yat” in the Russian language is needed only so that it is possible to distinguish the literate from the illiterate.”
But not only for this reason, many literate and writers took up arms against the spelling reform carried out in 1918, which abolished this strange letter. The fact is that, unlike many letters “exported” into the Russian alphabet from the Greek alphabet (and therefore, as we saw, very quickly becoming unnecessary here), the letter “yat” reflected a purely Slavic sound, which in Greek did not exist in principle. This sometimes helped a lot in writing a problematic letter. “Yat” was not used in words of foreign origin: “kommersant”, “Europe”, “Venice”. For the same reason, the clearly non-Slavic name of the Yenisei River was written with an “e”.
True, for some reason the capital of Austria was written with “yate”: “Vienna”. But in fact, this was another confirmation of the rule. Settlement of the Slavs across European continent started from the upper Danube. Naturally, the settlement on the site of the coastal Roman fortress of Vindobona was well known to the Slavs from ancient times under the name Vienia (or Viedenia). The place of the Old Slavonic "ie", as already mentioned, in the Russian language was taken by the letter "yat". Q.E.D. By the way, check Ukrainian language confirms this conclusion. "Vienna" in Ukrainian "Viden"
So the abolished letter “yat” was a kind of mark that distinguished “primordial” and Slavic words among Russian words. This is probably why in the debate about the reform of Russian spelling, this letter turned out to be a kind of boundary separating the “Westerners” and the “Slavophiles”. One of the first apologists for the abolition of “yatya” in the Russian language, writer and translator Dmitry Ivanovich Yazykov (1773-1845), 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.”. And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, known for his conservatism, already in Soviet times advocated for the return of “yatya” along with “er” to Russian grammar.
Useful links:
Original taken from cambria_1919 in THE POWER OF STONE know in yat
One of the writers of the Russian Abroad, Boris Panteleimonov, left a recording of the conversation.
It happened in Paris in the late 1940s. On Thursdays we drank tea with cookies at Teffi’s and talked about all sorts of things. We started talking about the letter "yat".
“Bunin is always for “yat”.
- Think: I will write “chalk,” that is, “the one with which they write,” “donkey,” that is, “went down to the bottom of the glass.” And without “yat” it turns out that the donkey (animal) chalked, that is, swept, into the glass. Nonsense.
Teffi remembers how some printing house was being transported in St. Petersburg and nine carloads of hard signs were taken away.”
Back then they were still arguing about the spelling reform of 1917! And many found it extremely harmful. The same Bunin found or the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, so beloved by N.S. Mikhalkov. Ilyin cursed the reform all his life and believed that the Russian language was forever spoiled and devoid of splendor.
These passions are so strange now. Bunin’s example with a donkey and chalk is easily resolved by using the letter e, which has happily existed since 1783 (its inventor is mistakenly considered to be N.M. Karamzin, but he proposed new letter E.R. Dashkova, then the head of the Academy of Sciences, and among the writers, G.R. Derzhavin was the first to use it).
Why did Bunin stand like a mountain behind the yat?
This letter, reminiscent of a solid sign with a vertical stroke rising above the line with two serifs, like the letter T (not to be confused with a real hard sign, er - ъ!) looks interesting and breaks up the smooth structure of the Cyrillic text with its crossbar sticking out above the line. However, never in the historical memory of the Eastern Slavs did it mean any special sound. This is the same E.
Where is she from?
Cyril and Methodius, the creators of our alphabet, relied on their native Greek (where yat actually sounded) and the Slavic language of the Balkans, which they knew well; They say that in some dialects of Bosnia and Macedonia there is a certain special sound that is designated yatem. Maybe. Although in Serbia yat was abolished back in the 1st half of the 19th century - much earlier than in Russia.
Yat risked disappearing even under the decisive pen of Peter the Great. The Tsar thought rationally and decided to remove duplicate letters and “Greeks” that were not needed by the Russian language from the alphabet. He also attempted to destroy Izhitsa, fita and yat, but the clergy managed to defend these letters - supposedly they were needed to convey “the subtlest differences in sound.” Peter managed to get rid of only such ballast as xi, psi, yus, zelo (S), etc.
Emperor Nicholas 1 really wanted to be like Peter and was going to carry out many reforms, but in the end he didn’t succeed in any of them. The abolition of outdated and unnecessary letters in the Russian alphabet seemed to be the most in a simple way be known as a reformer. But even here, supporters of traditions found arguments for doing nothing and not changing anything. The then famous writer N. Grech stated that “yat and company” are needed - “this is a sign of difference between the literate and the illiterate.” The emperor considered this opinion witty and did not touch anything in the alphabet.
Meanwhile, the problem has matured. Philologist D.I. Yazykov wrote in the same years about the letter yat: “...a stone lying out of place, over which everyone stumbles and which is not taken aside just because it is ancient and was once needed for a building.” Note, for a Greek building!
With the spread of gymnasiums, folk, and then parish schools, bringing grammar into line with the modern Russian language became urgent. Yat was the curse of the disciples. In order not to confuse yat with E, it was necessary to memorize all the cases of its use, and this is not a lot of words that come from a hundred roots!
Of course, memory poems were composed to help the unfortunate children, for example, the famous “Blyy bldnyy bldny bbls” (I denote this by the capital letter b), but this did not help much. Yat arose inexplicably in geographical names(DnЪpr, Dnjstr), sometimes in some names (Rognda, Sergy), sometimes in the name of the letter хъръ (х), sometimes in the month of April, or even completely - it’s not clear why? - in the Indian words Въды, Rigвъда, etc. All this had to be memorized so as not to be considered illiterate (Bunin often repeated these words of Grech). That is why the expression “to know in yat” arose. I confirmed the words with yatem - I reached the limit of perfection.
The spelling reform, which so infuriated Bunin, was developed not by the Bolsheviks, hated by the nobel, but by the Academy of Sciences, the most prominent language experts of that time, F.F. Fortunatov, A.A. Shakhmatov, I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay et al.
Emperor Nicholas II first became acquainted with their work in 1904. And he put it under the cloth. This is not the time, he decided. Another attempt to overcome the yat with reform happened in 1911. “Not recommended” - this was the decision of the sovereign.
Only the Provisional Government ordered in the summer of 1917 that schools switch to a new spelling, and it was actually the Bolsheviks who introduced it by law. Together with metric system measures and Gregorian calendar. Thus, paradoxically, they seized the laurels of academic authors and completed the work of Peter.
It is curious that the romanticization of the old spelling has revived in our time. Of course, it’s difficult to cope with yat - here you really need to finish a classical gymnasium. But another victim of the reform - er, ъ - is emblazoned everywhere, from beer bottles like "Pennov" to the logo of the Kommersant newspaper. Decorative "Russia that we lost."
Associative memory N.A. Teffi suggested a picture during that Parisian conversation about yats and spelling reform - nine carts of ers. In the old days, this unpronounceable letter was always placed at the end of a word if it ended with a consonant. So a lot of ers were required. Carts.
Unlike the Yatya, he is still alive.
He just became more modest. It's just a solid sign.
Exit, facility, two-tier, injection...
Yesterday I saw this: post-Yeltsin.
Alive!
to the newspaper logo
On October 10, 1918, a decree of the Council of People's Commissars and a resolution of the presidium were adopted Supreme Council National economy“On the withdrawal from circulation of common letters of the Russian language” (i decimal, fita and yat).
On October 10, 1918, a reform took place in Russia, as a result of which a new spelling was officially introduced, according to the website of the Presidential Library. The reform was discussed and prepared long before its practical implementation. So, in 1904, the spelling subcommittee at the Imperial Academy of Sciences, headed by A.A. Shakhmatov, issued a “Preliminary Report”, and in 1911, at a special meeting of the organization, after approving the work of the commission, a resolution was passed: to develop in detail the main parts of the reform. The corresponding decree was published in 1912.
Since that time, isolated publications have appeared, printed using the new spelling. The reform was officially announced (11) on May 24, 1917 in the form of “Resolutions of the meeting on the simplification of Russian spelling”, and (17) on May 30, based on the specified materials, the Ministry public education The Provisional Government ordered the district trustees to immediately carry out a reform of Russian spelling; another circular was issued (June 22) on July 5.
However, the reform then began only in school, which was confirmed by the decree of the Soviet People's Commissariat of Education dated (December 23, 1917) January 5, 1918. For the press and office work, only the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of October 10, 1918, published in Izvestia on October 13, became mandatory.
In accordance with the reform, the letters yat, fita, i (“and decimal”) were excluded from the alphabet; instead of them, e, f, and should be used, respectively; the hard sign (ъ) was excluded at the end of words and parts difficult words, but was retained as a dividing sign (rise, adjutant).
A number of other changes were introduced regarding the rules for writing prefixes in s/s, as well as some endings. The reform did not say anything about the fate of the letter Izhitsa, which was rare and out of practical use even before 1917; in practice, after the reform, it also completely disappeared from the alphabet.
As a result, the reform reduced the number of spelling rules that had no support in pronunciation, for example, the difference in genders in the plural or the need to memorize a long list of words spelled with “yat” (moreover, there were disputes among linguists regarding the composition of this list, and various spelling guidelines sometimes contradicted each other).
The reform also led to some savings in writing and typography, eliminating the Ъ at the end of words (according to the writer L.V. Uspensky, the text in the new orthography becomes about 1/30 shorter).
However, the majority of domestic linguists rejected this reform. Some believed that it impoverished the language, others believed that it was not radical enough. The reform also caused significant resistance in society. The first steps towards the practical implementation of spelling changes took place after the revolution, which determined a sharply critical attitude towards it on the part of political opponents of Bolshevism. That is why the innovations did not affect the majority of publications published in white-controlled territories, and then in emigration.
IN last decades The question of Russian spelling standards has again become relevant, primarily in connection with the revival of Orthodox culture, for which pre-revolutionary spelling has a sacred meaning.
