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Russian Language
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Source | Native speakers | Native rank | Total speakers | Total rank |
---|---|---|---|---|
G. Weber, "Top Languages", Language Monthly, 3: 12–18, 1997, ISSN 1369-9733 | 160,000,000 | 8 | 285,000,000 | 5 |
World Almanac (1999) | 145,000,000 | 8 (2005) | 275,000,000 | 5 |
SIL (2000 WCD) | 145,000,000 | 8 | 255,000,000 | 5–6 (tied with Arabic) |
CIA World Factbook (2005) | 160,000,000 | 8 |
Russian is the official language of Russia, although it shares the official status at regional level with other languages in the numerous ethnic autonomies within Russia, such as Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, and Yakutia. It is also an official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the de facto official language of the unrecognized country of Transnistria and partially recognized countries of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics.[19]
Ninety-four percent of the school students of Russia, 75% in Belarus, 41% in Kazakhstan, 20% in Ukraine, 23% in Kyrgyzstan, 21% in Moldova, 7% in Azerbaijan, 5% in Georgia and 2% in Armenia and Tajikistan receive their education only or mostly in Russian. The percentage of ethnic Russians is 80% in Russia, 10% in Belarus, 36% in Kazakhstan, 27% in Ukraine, 9% in Kyrgyzstan, 6% in Moldova, 2% in Azerbaijan, 1.5% in Georgia and less than 1% in both Armenia and Tajikistan.
Russian-language schooling is also available in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. However, due to recent high school reforms in Latvia (whereby the government pays a substantial sum to a school to teach in the national language), the number of subjects taught in Russian has been reduced in the country.[23] The language has a co-official status alongside Romanian in the autonomies of Gagauzia and Transnistria in Moldova. In the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine, Russian is recognized as a regional language alongside with Crimean Tatar. According to a poll by FOM-Ukraine, Russian is the most widely spoken language in Ukraine by a small margin.[25] However, despite its widespread usage, pro-Russian Crimean activists complain about the (mandatory) use of Ukrainian in schools, movie theaters, courts, on drug prescriptions and its use in the media and for government paperwork.[27]
Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary, a number of dialects exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of the Russian language into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region. Dialectology within Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants. The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient usage now completely discarded by the standard language.
The northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly (the phenomenon called okanye/оканье). East of Moscow, particularly inRyazan Region, unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (like in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced/a/ in such positions (e.g. несли is pronounced [nʲasˈlʲi], not [nʲɪsˈlʲi]) – this is called yakanye/ яканье; many southern dialects have a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the standard dialect) and a fricative [ɣ] where the standard dialect has [ɡ].
However, in certain areas south of Moscow, e.g. in and around Tula, /ɡ/ is pronounced as in the Moscow and northern dialects unless it precedes a voiceless plosive or a pause. In this position /ɡ/ is lenited and devoiced to the fricative [x], e.g. друг [drux] (in Moscow's dialect, only Бог[box], лёгкий [lʲɵxʲkʲɪj], мягкий [ˈmʲæxʲkʲɪj] and some derivatives follow this rule). Some of these features (e.g. a debuccalized or lenited /ɡ/ and palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs) are also present in modern Ukrainian, indicating either a linguistic continuum and/or strong influence one way or the other.
The city of Veliky Novgorod has historically displayed a feature called chokanye/tsokanye(чоканье/цоканье), where /tɕ/ and /ts/ were confused. So, цапля ("heron") has been recorded as 'чапля'. Also, the second palatalization of velars did not occur there, so the so-called ě² (from the Proto-Slavonic diphthong *ai) did not cause /k, ɡ, x/ to shift to /ts, dz, s/; therefore where Standard Russian has цепь ("chain"), the form кепь [kʲepʲ] is attested in earlier texts.
Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, Vladimir Dal compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary. Detailed mapping of Russian dialects began at the turn of the twentieth century. In modern times, the monumental Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language(Диалектологический атлас русского языка [dʲɪɐˌlʲɛktəlɐˈɡʲitɕɪskʲɪj ˈatləs ˈruskəvə jɪzɨˈka]), was published in three folio volumes 1986–1989, after four decades of preparatory work.
Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic (кириллица) alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their upper case forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound:
А /a/ | Б /b/ | В /v/ | Г /ɡ/ | Д /d/ | Е /je/ | Ё /jo/ | Ж /ʐ/ | З /z/ | И /i/ | Й /j/ |
К /k/ | Л /l/ | М /m/ | Н /n/ | О /o/ | П /p/ | Р /r/ | С /s/ | Т /t/ | У /u/ | Ф /f/ |
Х /x/ | Ц /ts/ | Ч /tɕ/ | Ш /ʂ/ | Щ /ɕɕ/ | Ъ /-/ | Ы [ɨ] | Ь /-/ | Э /e/ | Ю /ju/ | Я /ja/ |
Older letters of the Russian alphabet include <ѣ>, which merged to <е> (/je/) or /ʲe/); <і> and <ѵ>, which both merged to <и> (/i/); <ѳ>, which merged to <ф> (/f/); <ѫ>, which merged to <у> (/u/); <ѭ>, which merged to <ю> (/ju/ or /ʲu/); and <ѧ>/<ѩ>, which later were graphically reshaped into <я> and merged phonetically to/ja/ or /ʲa/. While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers <ъ> and <ь> originally indicated the pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/, /ĭ/.
Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз (“frost”) is transliterated moroz, and мышь (“mouse”), mysh or myš’. Transliteration is commonly used by those who live outside Russia, although it is now being used less and less often by Russians because of the extension of Unicode character encoding, which now incorporates different alphabets ranging from Latin to Hindi.
The Russian alphabet has many systems of character encoding. KOI8-R was designed by the government and was intended to serve as the standard encoding. This encoding is still used in UNIX-like operating systems. Nevertheless, the spread of MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows created chaos and ended by establishing different encodings as de-facto standards, with Windows-1251 became a de facto standard in Russian Internet and e-mail communication. A number of encoding conversion applications were developed. \ "iconv" is an example that is supported by most versions of Linux,Macintosh and some other operating systems. Most implementations (especially old ones) of the character encoding for the Russian language are aimed at simultaneous use of Latin and Russian characters only and do not include support for any other language. Certain hopes for a unification of the character encoding for the Russian alphabet are related to the Unicode standard, specifically designed for peaceful coexistence of various languages, including even dead languages. Unicode also supports the letters of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, which have many similarities with the Greek alphabet.
Russian spelling is reasonably phonemic in practice. It is in fact a balance among phonemics, morphology, etymology, and grammar; and, like that of most living languages, has its share of inconsistencies and controversial points. A number of rigid spelling rules introduced between the 1880s and 1910s have been responsible for the former whilst trying to eliminate the latter.
The current spelling follows the major reform of 1918, and the final codification of 1956. An update proposed in the late 1990s has met a hostile reception, and has not been formally adopted. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the French and German models.
According to the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent (знак ударения) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress. For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context doesn't make it obvious: замо́к/за́мок (lock/castle), сто́ящий/стоя́щий (worthwhile/standing), чудно́/чу́дно (this is odd/this is marvelous), молоде́ц/мо́лодец (attaboy/fine young man), узна́ю/узнаю́ (I shall learn it/I am recognizing it), отреза́ть/отре́зать (to cut/to have cut); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names (афе́ра, гу́ру, Гарси́я, Оле́ша, Фе́рми), and to express the stressed word in the sentence (Ты́ съел печенье?/Ты съе́л печенье?/Ты съел пече́нье? – Was it you who ate the cookie?/Did you eat the cookie?/Was the cookie your meal?). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners.
The phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic, but underwent considerable modification in the early historical period, before being largely settled around the year 1400.
The language possesses five vowels, which are written with different letters depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. (The hard consonants are often velarized, especially before back vowels, as in Irish, although in some dialects the velarization is limited to hard /l/). The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa. (See also: vowel reduction in Russian.)
The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to 4 consecutive sounds. Using a formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant the structure can be described as follows:
(C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)
Clusters of four consonants are not very common, however, especially within a morpheme. Examples: взгляд (/vzglʲat/, "glance"), строительств (/strʌˈʲitʲɛlʲstf/, "of constructions").
Bilabial | Labio- dental | Dental & Alveolar | Post- alveolar | Palatal | Velar | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | hard | /m/ | /n/ | ||||
soft | /mʲ/ | /nʲ/ | |||||
Plosive | hard | /p/ /b/ | /t/ /d/ | /k/ /ɡ/ | |||
soft | /pʲ/ /bʲ/ | /tʲ/ /dʲ/ | /kʲ/* [ɡʲ] | ||||
Affricate | hard | /ts/ | |||||
soft | /tɕ/ | ||||||
Fricative | hard | /f/ /v/ | /s/ /z/ | /ʂ/ /ʐ/ | /x/ [ɣ] | ||
soft | /fʲ/ /vʲ/ | /sʲ/ /zʲ/ | /ɕː/* /ʑː/* | [xʲ] [ɣʲ] | |||
Trill | hard | /r/ | |||||
soft | /rʲ/ | ||||||
Approximant | hard | /l/ | |||||
soft | /lʲ/ | /j/ |
Russian is notable for its distinction based on palatalization of most of the consonants. While /k/, /ɡ/, /x/ do have palatalized allophones [kʲ, ɡʲ, xʲ], only/kʲ/ might be considered a phoneme, though it is marginal and generally not considered distinctive (the only native minimal pair which argues for /kʲ/ to be a separate phoneme is "это ткёт" (/ˈɛtə tkʲot/, "it weaves")/"этот кот" (/ˈɛtət kot/, "this cat")). Palatalization means that the center of the tongue is raised during and after the articulation of the consonant. In the case of /tʲ/ and /dʲ/, the tongue is raised enough to produce slight frication (affricate sounds). These sounds: /t, d, ts, s, z, n and rʲ/ are dental, that is pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the teeth rather than against the alveolar ridge.
Russian has preserved an Indo-European synthetic-inflectional structure, although considerable leveling has taken place.
Russian grammar encompasses
The spoken language has been influenced by the literary one, but continues to preserve characteristic forms. The dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms since discarded by the literary language.
The total number of words in Russian is difficult to ascertain because of the ability to agglutinate and create manifold compounds, diminutives, etc. (see Word Formation under Russian grammar). The number of listed words or entries in some of the major dictionaries published during the last two centuries, and the total vocabulary of Alexander Pushkin (who is credited with greatly augmenting and codifying literary Russian), are as follows:
Work | Year | Words | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Academic dictionary, I Ed. | 1789–1794 | 43,257 | Russian and Church Slavonic with some Old Russian vocabulary |
Academic dictionary, II Ed | 1806–1822 | 51,388 | Russian and Church Slavonic with some Old Russian vocabulary |
Pushkin opus | 1810–1837 | 21,197 | - |
Academic dictionary, III Ed. | 1847 | 114,749 | Russian and Church Slavonic with Old Russian vocabulary |
Dahl's dictionary | 1880–1882 | 195,844 | 44,000 entries lexically grouped; attempt to catalogue the full vernacular language, includes some properly Ukrainian and Belarusian words |
Ushakov's dictionary | 1934–1940 | 85,289 | Current language with some archaisms |
Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language | 1950–1965 | 120,480 | full dictionary of the "Modern language" |
Ozhegov's dictionary | 1950s–1960s | 61,458 | More or less then-current language |
Lopatin's dictionary | 2000 | 163,293 | Orthographic, current language |
As a historical aside, Dahl was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, still insisting that the proper spelling of the adjective русский, which was at that time applied uniformly to all the Orthodox Eastern Slavic subjects of the Empire, as well as to its one official language, should be <руский> with one <с>, in accordance with ancient tradition and what he termed the "spirit of the language". He was contradicted by the philologist Grot, who distinctly heard the <с> lengthened or doubled.
The Russian language is replete with many hundreds of proverbs (пословица [pɐˈslovʲɪtsə]) and sayings (поговоркa [pəɡɐˈvorkə]). These were already tabulated by the seventeenth century, and collected and studied in the nineteenth and twentieth, with the folk-tales being an especially fertile source.
The history of Russian language may be divided into the following periods.
Judging by the historical records, by approximately 1000 AD the predominant ethnic group over much of modern European Russia, Ukraine and Belaruswas the Eastern branch of the Slavs, speaking a closely related group of dialects. The political unification of this region into Kievan Rus' in about 880, from which modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus trace their origins, established Old East Slavic as a literary and commercial language. It was soon followed by the adoption of Christianity in 988 and the introduction of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical and official language. Borrowings andcalques from Byzantine Greek began to enter the Old East Slavic and spoken dialects at this time, which in their turn modified the Old Church Slavonic as well.
Dialectal differentiation accelerated after the breakup of Kievan Rus' in approximately 1100. On the territories of modern Belarus and Ukraine emerged Ruthenian and in modern Russia medieval Russian. They definitely became distinct since the 13th century, i.e. following the division of that land between theGrand Duchy of Lithuania, Poland and Hungary in the west and independent Novgorod and Pskov feudal republics plus numerous small duchies (which came to be vassals of the Tatars) in the east.
The official language in Moscow and Novgorod, and later, in the growing Muscovy, was Church Slavonicwhich evolved from Old Church Slavonic and remained the literary language for centuries, until the Petrine age, when its usage shrank drastically to biblical and liturgical texts. Russian developed under a strong influence of Church Slavonic until the close of the 17nth century; afterwards the influence reversed, leading to corruption of liturgical texts.
The political reforms of Peter the Great (Пётр Вели́кий, Pyótr Velíkiy) were accompanied by a reform of the alphabet, and achieved their goal of secularization and Westernization. Blocks of specialized vocabulary were adopted from the languages of Western Europe. By 1800, a significant portion of the gentry spoke French, less often German, on an everyday basis. Many Russian novels of the 19th century, e.g. Lev Tolstoy's (Лев Толсто́й) War and Peace, contain entire paragraphs and even pages in French with no translation given, with an assumption that educated readers would not need one.
The modern literary language is usually considered to date from the time of Aleksandr Pushkin (Алекса́ндр Пу́шкин) in the first third of the 19th century. Pushkin revolutionized Russian literature by rejecting archaic grammar and vocabulary (so called "высо́кий стиль" — "high style") in favor of grammar and vocabulary found in the spoken language of the time. Even modern readers of younger age may only experience slight difficulties understanding some words in Pushkin’s texts, since relatively few words used by Pushkin have become archaic or changed meaning. In fact, many expressions used by Russian writers of the early 19th century, in particular Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov (Михаи́л Ле́рмонтов), Nikolai Gogol (Никола́й Го́голь), Alexandr Griboyedov (Алекса́ндр Грибое́дов), became proverbs or sayings which can be frequently found even in the modern Russian colloquial speech.
Зи́мний ве́чер IPA:
[ˈzʲimnʲɪj ˈvʲetɕɪr]Бу́ря мгло́ю не́бо кро́ет, [ˈburʲɐ ˈmɡloju ˈnʲɛbɐ ˈkroɪt]
Ви́хри сне́жные крутя́; [ˈvʲixrʲɪ ˈsʲnʲɛʐnɨɪ kruˈtʲa]
То, как зверь, она́ заво́ет, [to kak zvʲerʲ ɐˈna zɐˈvoɪt]
То запла́чет, как дитя́, [to zɐˈplatɕɪt, kak dʲɪˈtʲa]
То по кро́вле обветша́лой [to po ˈkrovlʲɪ ɐbvʲɪˈtʂaləj]
Вдруг соло́мой зашуми́т, [vdruk sɐˈloməj zəʂuˈmʲit]
То, как пу́тник запозда́лый, [to kak ˈputnʲɪk zəpɐˈzdalɨj]
К нам в око́шко застучи́т. [knam vɐˈkoʂkə zəstuˈtɕit]
The political upheavals of the early 20th century and the wholesale changes of political ideology gave written Russian its modern appearance after the spelling reform of 1918. Political circumstances and Soviet accomplishments in military, scientific and technological matters (especially cosmonautics), gave Russian a worldwide prestige, especially during the middle third of the 20th century.
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