the two mirs

[William Ryan]

I am afraid there is no 'scientific proof' in matters like this,
especially before the introduction of printing when there were no
dictionaries or means of encouraging standard spelling. It would be
perfectly possible to find either or both spellings of mir in a
manuscript in any of the several senses of the word without being able
to draw any real conclusion as to whether the writer intended a semantic
distinction.
        The two letters for i, like the two letters for z, had to be retained
in Cyrillic because they were also numbers, and the Cyrillic numeral
system more or less followed the Greek. Greek eta, from which the
Cyrillic undotted i vos'merichnoe is derived graphically, meant 8; and
Greek iota, from which the Cyrillic dotted i derived, meant 10. In
numerical contexts (accounts, taxation, inventories, fines, trade etc.)
it clearly mattered to use the right one. In all other uses both the i's
and the z's were frequently interchangeable. Dotted i tended to be used
before other vowels.
        The word mir in Church Slavonic and Old Russian, as far as I can
discover, is normally spelled with an i vos'merichnoe in all senses in
earlier texts (quite reasonably since they do seem to be etymologically
the same), although the problem is complicated by the fact that many
published editions of texts have silently normalized the spelling using
the modern i.
        The Academy of Sciences in 1738 standardized the single dotted i as
appropriate for use before vowels and i kratkoe - and specifically in
the word mir in the sense of the cosmos. However, the practice must have
already been common, since the first actual statement that mir = peace
and mir = cosmos are to be distinguished by the use of the two i's
appears to be in Ludolf, Grammatica Russica, Oxford, 1696, p. 9. Ludolf
also quotes mir spelled with an izhitsa (yet another i letter, preserved
mostly in words of Greek origin, with a value of 400), meaning myrrh,
but this would only be a possible source of confusion in the obliques
cases since its nominative is normally miro.
        My guess is that the distinguishing of the two mirs by spelling might
well have come about through the strictly controlled printing house
practices in 17th-century Muscovy. Any better explanation would be very
welcome.

Will Ryan

> > Nikolaus Lutz-Dettinger wrote:
>
> > the problem is of course, that this is just a possibility; it would be nice
> > if we could have some scientific proof, i.e. an old text where mir is used
> > both as society and as peace in a very practical sense, let's say a peace
> > treaty, and is spelled the same in both instances. Has anyone an opinion at
> > hand, from when the first text dates with evidently different spelling of
> > both mirs (that is, not counting different spelling probably due to writing
> > errors)?
> > Another question: are there other words in Russian, which are ambiguous now,
> > while they were distinct from each other as long as the i desjaterichnoe
> > existed?

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