Re: Yers (was Re: Apologies)

At 03:19 PM 11/29/03 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>Talk about a waste of time, memorizing which are jat's and which are e's.
>Jat' does not normally alternate with jo, which gives some clue, but
>basically it does nothing but obfuscate the spelling.  Who knows why Peter
>didn't abolish jat', izhitsa, iota, and fita when he had the chance.
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."  It
lets you know that the origin of the word is Greek and lets you know the
Greek spelling, distinguishing between phi and theta.  Otherwise a Russian
would not know whether the Greek form of the name were Philaret or *Thilaret.

Izhitsa has similar historical/etymological significance, although I will
admit that izhitsa is a bit confusing, having a vocalic value of [u] and a
consonental value of [v].  Confusing or not, it is consistent with modern
Greek pronunciation of the letter.

I myself know of one minimal pair with iota.  The words for 'world' and
'peace' are both mir, but spelled with an iota it means 'world.'  'Peace'
is spelled with i.

The rules for using iota are very easy.  If it is an [i] sound before
another vowel, it is spelled with iota, otherwise it's not.

As far as jat', there are certain cases where there is no difference in
pronunciation between that and a est, but extra grammatical information can
be gleaned from a written text.

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.

Isidora

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