Russian language. #1. A to ... Я, or Latin vs Cyrillic.
In the beginning, the Slavs made attempts to write ‘with strokes and notches’, and later they tried to use Greek and Latin letters for this purpose, as we know from the Slavic writer Chernorizets Hrabar. On the Balkan peninsula, between the 7-9th C AD, the Slavs lived together with the (Proto)Bulgarians (and under their rule) till the former assimilated the latter. The Bulgarians came from Asia, and at that time used to speak a non-Slavic language (most probably Turkic), and used to write their official documents in Greek, with Greek letters (using at the same time undeciphered runic signs as well). The Bulgarians also faced difficulties in writing some sounds with Greek letters, for instance, the sounds [tʃ] and [ʒ] were written by the Greek τζ and ζ. The Arab Ibn-Fadlan wrote in the 10th century AD that the Slavs who lived in present-day Russia used to put on the grave poles, bearing inscriptions with the names of the dead people. However, it is not clear what letters were used for that purpose. If it is true, as D. Cheshmedzhiev supposes, that the passage in Life of Saint Cyrill, in which the so-called р№шка писмена ’Rush letters’ were mentioned (which Constantine-Cyrill was said to have seen in Kherson, in Crimea, during his mission trip to the KhazarKhaganate, in the year 860, and which were considered by some Russian scientists to be an original script of the Russian Slavs), was inserted in that literary work not earlier than the 12th century (when the Russians already knew the Cyrillic letters), there will be no point in arguing what the national character of these letters was. At the end of the 9th century AD, the Slavs in Moravia, Panonia, and Bulgaria began writing in the newly created by St. Cyrill original Glagolitic script. However, the Glagolitic alphabet was replaced little by little by other alphabets, and only the Croats used it for several more centuries, alongside with the Latin and the Cyrillic scripts.
The so called Cyrillic alphabet (а misleading name), which originated in the First Bulgarian Kingdom at the beginning of the 10th century, and replaced the official Bulgarian Glagolitic script, was created by Constantine the Philosopher (Saint Cyril), and accepted by the Bulgarian ruler Boris I, at the end of the 9th century. The change took place in the reign of Boris’s son, Tsar Simeon I, who was strongly influenced by Greek culture. After a period of parallel use of the Glagolitic and the Cyrillic scripts during the 10-11th centuries in the first Bulgarian kingdom(sometimes even in mixed texts), since the 11th century, the latter has been an official Bulgarian, Russian, and Ukrainian alphabet (while the other Slavic peoples have used the Latin script during certain periods or unceasingly). There are no certain data about who and when has created the Cyrillic alphabet, although some scholars say that it was created byConstantine-Cyril himself (who presumably created both alphabets) or his disciples Clement of Ochrid and Konstantine of Preslav. However, there is no proof of that. The first accretion is not serious, and the other two are not supported by the facts, even the opposite is more likely (see the wonderful article by Ivan Dobrev in The Cyrillo-Methodian Encyclopedia). Moreover, in Life of Cyril it was written that when the Byzantine emperor asked Constantine the Philosopher (St. Cyril) to create an alphabet for the Slavs (the Glagolitic one), the former complained to Constantine that the previous two emperors had not been able to cope with that task.
In 1708, the Russian Tsar Peter I the Great conducted an orthographic reform, introducing a new type of Cyrillic letters, called civil script, modelled in a Dutch work shop. It was helped by the spread of the Latin script among the educated people in Russia in the period between 1680–1690. The reform was a compromise between the supporters of the old Cyrillic tradition and the supporters of West-European culture. Many of the old Cyrillic letters were replaced by newer ones, similar to them, and accentuation marks and abbreviations as well as the different letters for designating one sound in a different position in the word were no longer used,. The letter was replaced by я. The use of the backwards э instead of е (which was borrowed from Bulgarian books) began to designate the hard [е] in borrowed words: мэр ‘mayor’, from French maire.
The letters ѕ, θ, ξ, ψ, v were thrown out. The civil script is the basis of all modern Cyrillic alphabets. The first book, printed with the new script was ГЕОМЕТРIА ‘geometry’.
After Lenin came to power in Russia in 1917, an orthographic reform discarded some letters (э, Ї) from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, which was imposed on many European, Siberian and Middle-Asian peoples that lived in the state. Some of them did not have writing systems before (see further); others used the Mongolian (the Buryats), the Arabic (the Tatars, the Avars, the Kazakh), the Georgian (the Abkhaz, part of the Ossetians) or the Greek scripts (the Alans or Ossetians, the Gagauz).
Although reforms of the orthography had been discussed and advanced incrementally from Peter’s time to the early twentieth century, implementation of a complete reform awaited the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The changes were introduced via decree by the People’s Commissariat for Education of December 23, 1917 and took effect with a decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of October 10, 1918. The reforms corresponded with the shift away from preoccupation with historical-comparativism and a focus on Indo-European origins of Russian (and other European languages) to a rising concern with language structure and description, apperception of the social function of language, the study of language as a system of signs and, in particular, the recognition of the phoneme, the meaning-distinguishing unit of sound. Among the proponents of the reform was the renowned linguist J. N. Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929), a fundamental figure in the development of structural linguistics.
The orthographic reform was intended to facilitate rapid and widespread acquisition of literacy among Russian speakers, both native speakers of Russian and speakers of Russian as a second-language, state subjects of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks’ challenge was to inculcate socialist ideology to a population that was highly stratified with a relatively small literate elite and a vast underclass of peasants and workers with little to no literacy. These, moreover, spoke varieties of Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian that were linguistically distinct from the literary language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Additionally, Tsarist attempts to acculturate non-Russians to Russian speech had been only partially successful, a process that was not yet fully complete even at the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Just as Peter had recognized almost two centuries earlier that the streamlining and westernization of the written language was essential to building a civil state on western models, the Bolsheviks saw language and the written medium as keys to forming a national and collective identity, homo sovieticus, and a new classless state.
Although the reform of the orthography would be criticized on ideological grounds by émigré groups and, after the collapse of the USSR in Russia proper, as a perversion of historical tradition committed by the Bolsheviks, the general outlines of the reform were already widely agreed upon in the nineteenth century. The last phase of attempts to reform the orthography began in earnest in 1862, in the period of Alexander II's Great Reforms. The process pitted traditionalists, who supported Ia. K. Grot’s (1812–1893) orthography against reformists, who saw the archaisms of the old orthography as a drag on literacy and learning. The Russian linguist A. A. Shakhmatov (1864–1920), an early structuralist, viewed the reform as a continuation of the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition, given that the initial impulse to create a Slavic writing system was to render speech faithfully in writing as part of a living tradition.
