Re: "New World": Little Russia (Malaja Rus'), Texas

On Sat, 19 Aug 2000 05:39:24 -0700, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

>But the most important ethnicity in my "alternative history" (that is,
>the early part of this new century) are the Texas Russians, who settled
>the area around San Antonio (where there really is a "Little Russia"
>community!) in the Hill Country (a.k.a. God's country ;] ).  These
>settlers were led on what is called the "Trek", through Siberia and
>Alaska and into the continent, and were welcomed by the Mexican
>government with open arms.
Hmm... unfortunately, I don't know much about the Siberian dialects
of Russian... It seems that they preserve unstressed [o] and have a
different phrase intonation; I am not sure about the preservation of
word-final voiced consonants. If there were many 'Old Believers' among
the first wave of colonists, their language must have been more
intensely influenced by Church Slavonic. The influence of Ukrainian
in modern Siberian dialects is probably due to late migration influxes.

>The inhabitants of Little Russia are mostly East Slavs, with a German
>minority (not the same Germans who inhabited places like New Braunfels,
>Boerne, Schertz etc.).  Their language is basically an East Slavonic
>language, but there is a great deal of German influence as well as
>Latin.  The Cyrillic script used is not much different from the
>pre-Soviet alphabet (it still has the letters i, jat, izhitsa and
>fita),
That's nice... I like the old orthography :)

>except umlauted a, o and u are also used, along with an sz
>ligature: ß(which is rarely used actually since Cyrillic has letters
>for /s/, /z/ and /ts/ already).
For what sounds, I wonder?

Rather, I'd consider introducing some new letters for the sounds that
could appear in loanwords ([d_Z', D, T, h, w, N]) or simply fill in the
gaps in the system ([G], [d_z] - both present in New Greek, though...).

Note also that _Malaya Rus'_ (or _Maloróssiya_) is the historical name
of Ukraine (formerly, in the sense 'Russia proper' :-]). _Malen'kaya
Rossiya_ is a bit cumbersome and doesn't sound like a real placename.

In today's Russian, there is a jocose way to refer to American states,
like _Tekháschina_, _Oklakhómshchina_ - modeled on the traditional names
of some Russian oblasts like _Bryánshchina_ (Bryansk Region) or
_Smolénshchina_ (Smolensk Region).

If you need a similar derivate for a narrower area, I can provide one :)


Basilius