Re: Yers (was Re: Apologies)
| From: | John Cowan <cowan@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, December 1, 2003, 5:17 |
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Isidora Zamora scripsit:
> The reason to keep the fita in Russian is similar to the reason that we
> choose to spell the English word "photograph" instead of "fotograf."
Mindless conservatism is a *feature* of English spelling. In Russian
spelling, it's marginal. :-)
> The loss of the letters is all fine and good for modern Russian, but you
> start running into problems when Church Slavonic texts are printed in
> modern Russian orthography. Then there is a loss of grammatical
> information.
Sure. I'm not proposing that CS (which is really a mutant form of
Old Bulgarian) get a spelling reform at this late date, simply that the
spelling reforms that led to modern Russian spelling, both Peter's and
Lenin's, made a great deal of sense. (Except that Peter should have
standardized on the acute accent for the stress instead of dropping
all accents whatsoever, and should have done something about "o".)
--
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