new Russian orthography?

[Patricia Chaput]

        Perhaps I have missed a posting, but in the messages Ive seen
there has been a crucial piece of information missing.  In modern Russian,
the spelling of "hard sign" occurs (as we tell our students), "after a
prefix ending in a consonant, before a root beginning with jot."  Sverx is
considered a prefix (pristavka in Ozhegov and Shvedova) and the numerical
dvux, trex, and chetyrex function like prefixes.  Therefore we find the
well-known and familiar forms:

ob"jasnit', s"est', s"ezd, ot"ezd, pod"ezd, pod"exat', pod"ezzhat', etc.
Also:  sverx"estestvennyj, dvux"jarusnyj (but not dvujazychnyj, with
variant dvu-), trex"jarusnyj, trex"jazychnyj, etc.

But where there is no jot, or no-prefix final consonant, we don't find a
hard sign:  dvuxetazhnyj (no jot), trexetazhnyj, etc. or pjatijazychnyj
(no consonant-final prefix).
The fact that the root must begin with jot if the hard sign is to be
required eliminates roots beginning with "i" since these roots (such as
id-, igr-, im, etc.) do not begin with jot.  Recall that we must remind
students of this one exception to rule that an initial soft vowel letter
spells j + V  (as in the words jazyk, est', ezh, jumor, etc., contrasted
with Ivan).  Therefore with native Russian words we find hard consonant +
i spelled as expected: Cy, as in predydushchij (not pred"idushchij),
bezymjannyj (not bez"imjannyj), bezysxodnyj, bezyskusstvennyj,
nebezyzvestnyj, etc.  (And with some borrowings: nebezynteresnyj.  In some
of these forms the "i" is not root-initial, rather another prefix, but the
spelling rule is the same.)

These same consonant-final prefixes, when occurring before any jot-initial
root, require the hard sign, as expected:  pred"javit, bez"jadernyj,
bez"jazykij.

As has been observed, foreign borrowings may preserve this rule of
consonant-final prefix + root-initial jot:  ad"jutant, ad"junkt,
kon"junktiva, kon"junktura, etc.

But with acronyms such as gorispolkom and borrowings such as
postindustrialnyj we would never have expected a hard sign.  If these
words were to be russified we might expect the "i" to become "y", but not
the hard sign.

Note that it is not the phonetic sequence that requires the spelling of
"hard sign."  When the jot occurs in a similar phonological environment,
but not in the morphological environment of prefix + root, the spelling
convention requires a soft sign, not a hard sign:  kon'jak.   Neither can
we attribute the spelling of hard sign to marking obligatory hardness,
since the rules of softness assimilation allow such combinations as s"ezd
(with dentals) that can be pronounced soft, and other softenings no doubt
occur in rapid speech.

I hope this has been helpful in clarifying these spellings, and also hope
that my use of transliteration has not confused the issue.  Pat Chaput


On Fri, 15 Jan 1999, Yoshimasa Tsuji wrote:

> Dear Seelangers,
> Thank you all who have kindly enlightened me, especially, A. Israeli,
> F.J. Miller, P. Seriot, and F.Y. Gladney.
>
> I have observed that
>   1. when acronyms are formed, hard "i" will be spelt as if it were
>      soft ("pedinstitut", "Gorispolkom")
>   2. some people have found similarity with "te/de" of foreign origin.
>      e.g. tennis, printer.
>   3. there are also  "postimpressionizm", etc.
>
> Of these, the case 2 is obviously out of the mark.
> The case 1 seems to be the tradition for quite long (as the abbreviation
> type of "Gorispolkom" was not very common before the Bolshevik Revolution,
> I am not too sure about that, though).
>
> The case 3 shows that foreign words are spelt more or less in a
> foreign way, which is our case.
>
> Incidentally, I have noticed that the Slovar' russkago jazyka by
> the Imperial Academy of Sciences (1895 edition) prefers <y> while,
> A. Alexandrow's Complete Russian-English Dictionary (1904 edition,
> related to the Ministry of Education) prefers <"i>.
>
> Alina Israeli has pointed out that <bezinteresnyj> was used by
> an educated person becausee of the reluctance to break the
> morphological looks of the word. I would have thought, <bez"interesnyj>
> would have done it in a more sensible manner, but <hard sign> is
> not well loved after its elimination from the word ending as you all
> know... (there still  exist <ad"jutant>, <kon"junktura>, <in"ekcija>,
> <bez"jadernyj>, etc.)
>
> Thank you. I think the matter is now closed.
>
> Tsuji
>