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

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 16:16:52 -0700, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

>--- Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...> wrote:  [in reply to myself]
>There were three main Russian migrations, called the Treks.  The First
>Trek took place in the 1800s, much of which predated the Texas
>Revolution.  Some went through Siberia and Alaska, but still others
>ended up in Mexico or the eastern States of the young US republic.
>Some of these settlers were apparently known even to Stephen F. Austin.
> The First Trek contained the largest groups of non-Orthodox Christians
>and Jews.  Like the other Treks, people came not only from Russia
>proper, but from what is today Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and
>Kazakhstan.  The Germans living in Russia came with the first settlers.
>
>The Second and Third Treks took place during the 20th and early 21st
>centuries respectively.  The history of Russian migration could be
>compared to the real-world history of Irish immigration, which took
>place in two waves (mostly Protestants from the 1700s, Catholics from
>the 1800s).
Then, the language won't be too different from today's mainland Russian?

> Well maybe except for all the final
>hard-signs.
Consider using the hard sign for distinguishing some homonymous endings!

>The umlauted vowels result from German and French influence, as back
>vowels are fronted in a form of umlaut paralleling both languages.
I see a phonological problem here: these sounds do exist in Russian as
allophones (of [o] and [u] *between* soft consonants). Foreign front
labialized vowels are perceived as (back) labialized vowels following
a soft consonant. IMO it's very difficult to build them in the system.

OTOH nothing prevents from introducing new orthographic conventions for
the reflexes of such sounds in borrowings. E. g. <u>, <o> + soft sign
(like in some Cyrillic-based orthographies used in the Caucasus).

>I
>also separate the two e's, the one that makes soft consonants and the
>one that makes hard ones.  (I reckon the former is accomplished with
>the letter Yat... ¿verdad?)
Not exactly. _Yat'_ denoted soft consonant + [e]. In theory, [e]
following a hard consonant should be denoted by 'reverse e', but its
usage has never been consistent in non-initial position.

You may think about using the Ukrainian wide/narrow e's.


> I could go so far as to
>reassign the phonetic value [T] to Fita...
For the Russian speakers of today, this is an exotical letter which can
be assigned any phonetic value to. But for people suited to the
traditional spelling it was probably strongly associated with [f].

Don't forget the superscript letters used in older varieties of
Cyrillics - they'll enable you to render any souds you wish.

And think of reintroducing the obligatory accent signs. IMO it wasn't
too clever of Peter I to disable them.

>> 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).
>
>And Bush City, called Bushchina?
The city with the adjacent area, rather than the city itself. But I
like how it sounds!

I think the official name for the city will be still a transliteration
(Bush-siti), but colloquially it could be Russified into some Búshevo :)


Basilius