Russian orthography


Russian orthography is formally considered to encompass spelling and punctuation. Russian spelling, which is quite phonemic in practice, is a mix of the morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the French and German models.
The attempts to reflect vowel reduction when not under stress. The sounds that are presented are those of the standard language; other dialects may have noticeably different pronunciation for the vowels.

Spelling

Russian is written with a modern variant of the Cyrillic script. Russian spelling typically avoids arbitrary digraphs. Except for the use of hard and soft signs, which have no phonetic value in isolation but can follow a consonant letter, one phoneme is never represented with more than one letter.

Morphological principle

Under the morphological principle, the morphemes are attached without modification; the compounds may be further agglutinated. For example, the long adjective шарикоподшипниковый, sharikopodshipnikoviy may be decomposed as follows :
Note again that each component in the final production retains its basic form, despite the vowel reduction.
The phonetic assimilation of consonant clusters also does not usually violate the morphological principle of the spelling. For example, the decomposition of счастье , is as follows:
Note the assimilation with - so that it represents the same sound as -. The spelling <щастие> was fairly common among the literati in the eighteenth century, but is usually frowned upon today.

Phonetic principle

The phonetic principle implies that:
Pronunciation may also deviate from normal phonological rules. For example, unstressed is usually pronounced or, but радио is pronounced, with an unstressed final.

Etymological principle

The fact that Russian has retained much of its ancient phonology has made the historical or etymological principle less relevant. Because the spelling has been adjusted to reflect the changes in the pronunciation of the yers and to eliminate letters with identical pronunciation, the only systematic examples occur in some foreign words and in some of the inflectional endings, both nominal and verbal, which are not always written as they are pronounced. For example:

Grammatical principle

The grammatical principle has become stronger in contemporary Russian. It specifies conventional orthographic forms to mark grammatic distinctions. Some of these rules are ancient, and could perhaps be considered etymological; some are based in part on subtle, and not necessarily universal, distinctions in pronunciation; and some are basically arbitrary. Some characteristic examples follow.
For nouns ending in a sibilant -, -, -, -, a soft sign is appended in the nominative singular if the gender is feminine, and is not appended if masculine:
The past passive participle has a doubled --, the same word used as an adjective has a single -- :
Prepositional phrases in which the literal meaning is preserved are written with the words separated; when used adverbially, especially if the meaning has shifted, they are usually written as a single word:

Punctuation

Basic symbols

The full stop , colon, semicolon, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, and ellipsis are equivalent in shape to the basic symbols of punctuation used for the common European languages, and follow the same general principles of usage.
The colon is used exclusively as a means of introduction, and never, as in slightly archaic English, to mark a periodic pause intermediate in strength between the semicolon and the full stop .

Comma usage

The comma is used very liberally to mark the end of introductory phases, on either side of simple appositions, and to introduce all subordinate clauses. The English distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses does not exist:

Hyphenation

The hyphen , and em dash are used to mark increasing levels of separation. The hyphen is put between components of a word, and the em-dash to separate words in a sentence, in particular to mark longer appositions or qualifications that in English would typically be put in parentheses, and as a replacement for a copula:
In short sentences describing a noun in present tense :

Direct speech

are not used to mark paragraphed direct quotation, which is instead separated out by the em-dash :

Quotation

Inlined direct speech and other quotation is marked at the first level by guillemets «», and by lowered and raised reversed double quotes at the second:
Unlike American English, the period or other terminal punctuation is placed outside the quotation. As the example [|above] demonstrates, the quotes are often used to mark the names of entities introduced with the generic word.

Parenthetical expressions

These are introduced with the international symbol of parentheses . However, their use is typically restricted to pure asides, rather than, as in English, to mark apposition.

Controversies

Spelling

As in many languages, the spelling was formerly quite more phonemic and less consistent. However, the influence of the major grammarians, from Meletius Smotrytsky to Lomonosov to Grot, ensured a more careful application of morphology and etymology.
Today, the balance between the morphological and phonetic principles is well established. The etymological inflexions are maintained by tradition and habit, although their non-phonetic spelling has occasionally prompted controversial calls for reform. A primary area where the spelling is utterly inconsistent and therefore controversial is:
These two points have been the topic of scientific debate since at least the middle of the nineteenth century.
In the past, uncertainty abounded about which of the ordinary or iotated/palatalizing series of vowels to allow after the sibilant consonants , , , , , which, as mentioned above, are not standard in their hard/soft pairs. This problem, however, appears to have been resolved by applying the phonetic and grammatical principles to define a complicated though internally consistent set of spelling rules.
In 2000–2001, a minor revision of the 1956 codification was proposed. It met with public protest and has not been formally adopted.

History

The modern system of spelling was rationalized by Grot in the 1880s. The spelling reform of 1918 significantly changed the appearance of the language by eliminating two frequently used letters ѣ and і, as well as the use of the word-final ъ, although it did not introduce fundamental theoretical changes to the principles he laid down.
Contemporary spelling and punctuation follow the 1956 rules, which were aimed at codifying existing practice rather than establishing new principles.

Russian