Talk:Reforms of Russian orthography

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Here are my thoughts of a new spelling reform:

Ў = Good. It makes sense. It is a short У, much like an й is a short и. I could see having a Ўикпедия. The letter could be the same as й, and be considered a consonant, making words ending in this letter masculine.

Any thoughts on this one?

Җ = Bad. Too little usage. Too much space taken up in the alphabet.

Һ = Maybe good. Maybe bad. It makes an easy distinction between an h and a х, unlike the Ukrainian system, which uses a letter that looks identical to another one. I doubt that it would be used very often, though, so it would take up unnecessary room on a keyboard. And the two don't sound too different.

but, in Russian, the sounds are not differenciated (or to be precise, Russian lacks the /ɦ/ known from other slavic languages), so the introduction would be purely orthographic, without any deeper meaning.

If anything, any new letters added for purposes of pronunciation of foreign words could be for vowels, as in the pronunciation of радио. Perhaps there should be a mark showing that the o is said like an o, not like a schwa.

The beauty of current orthography is that it very elegantly coincides with reducing of unstressed vowels. Any attempt to design a more phonetic alphabet would be rather ill-aimed, since words would lost their orthographic stability with regard to inflections.

A th sound might not be too bad either. I doubt that there would be a need for a voiced th, as in "the," as it is relatively rare.

You certainly do not want to import into Russian orthography all the foreign phonemes! You might as well switch to IPA then :-)

I was just throwing out ideas! :-) Like Җ, it would take up too much room anyway.

Ё = Good. Write it all the time. It makes it easier to anybody that doesn't speak the language natively. If anything, change the letter to make it look different from e. Е and ё are too different to be written as the same letter, in my opinion.

in fact, they are almost allophones, since reduced Ё turns into Е (see сестра vs. сёстры), so keeping one of them a special version of the other is sensible.

How about the letter S? It isn't used in Russian. Maybe it could be used as the yo sound. Or maybe even J. Anything. Ө?

no, no, no :-) Ѕ is a consonant in Macedonian and Old Slavonic. Using it as a completely unrelated vowel would be extremely confusing. Ditto for Ј (serbian). Ө is not a bad choice, but then you can use ukrainian-like 'ьо' anyway. And Ө is too similar to Ѳ (fita), therefore a potential for confusion (even if fita is archaic)

How about a version of E? Like iotating it with a I to the left of it. Not that it isn't already. But it could make the distinction between the two without making them look too different. The capital Ё could look like Ю, except with the O replaced with E, and the bar connecting the two would form the middle stroke of the E. Like the Є iotified that exists already, except not Є. The lower cased ё could be like ю again, with the bar connecting the two merging into the first part of e that you write at the left. It'd be very quick to write. This would make it harder to not write the difference between е and ё, while making them look similar enough to not make people confused.

How about using U/u for Ё/ё? It's not already used in Russian and already sounds very similar in many other languages it is used in.

Ц = Maybe good. It would alter the spelling of many words, and could be confusing when first looking at a word that used to contain ц. However, it could free up some room for Ў or any other new letters.

we are introducing some letters to cover phonemes that are not represented consistently, and on the other hand, you want to eliminate a letter and in this way introduce another inconsistency? This is inconsistent :-)

I was just thinking out loud - nobody'd want to get rid of ц anyway. Nobody doesn't love molten boron.

ы = Maybe bad. Can't we make it just one letter already?

It is one letter (if you are talking about yery). Perhaps just a typographically different glyph could be used, without change in semantics (e.g. blending the components together)

Yes, they should be put together. Maybe a и and ь could be put together, with the second part of the и forming the first stroke of the ь. The two parts would be flipped around though.

The rest could simply stay the same. Replacing the hard sign with the soft sign would be increadibly confusing, in my opinion, as they do opposite tasks. It doesn't make sense to consider them the same letter. Replacing й with the soft sign would also make no sense.

in fact, replacing й with ь makes sense, since they are complementary (ь can never appear after a vowel, and й can never appear after a consonant), and marking palatalization with letter corresponding to /j/ has been quite common, e.g. in modern Slovenian and Croatian. Choice of ь over й is probably just aesthetic, maybe if it were written with "ј" you could see easily the duality of the character (матј, мој)

I guess I just like having two different letters. :-)

BirdValiant 05:14, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

sorry that I broke down your text, but I wanted to pinpoint the individual issues rado 16:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

More additions. BirdValiant 04:03, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed changes

• Introducing a new letter, Џ (a voiced analog of Ч)
• Introducing a new letter, Ў (Pronounced /w/) — using it in such names as Ўашингтон
• Introducing a new letter, Һ (Pronounced /h/) — using it in such names as Һавана

Huh. And these changes were proposed by whom? Could anyone cite any sources to back these claims? The last two explicitly make no sense as they are supposed to stand for sounds that are non-existent in Russian. Why should anyone come up with a letter to use in Ўашингтон when it's Вашингтон and starts with the [v] sound in Russian? (BTW, the Ў exists in Belarussian)

Well, there are у sounds in some foreign words that are actually w, like Сноуборд. It'd be shortened up. By the way, I wouldn't like the analog of Ч, as Дж is already used. Джордж. It works fine. BirdValiant 02:35, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

OK, I'm saying сноуборд out loud (native speaker, standard Moscow accent) - oops, sorry, even though the unstressed [u] tends to shorten a bit - as it always does after a vowel - it's still not the [w] sound: 07:50, 5 March 2006 (UTC)