History of the Russian language
[7] From the 12th and 13th centuries, regional phonetic and grammatical variations within Church Slavonic texts could be detected, indicating the eventual divergence of the language.
[8][better source needed] Around c. 1200, and especially after the sack of Kiev in 1240, when Mongols and Tatars established the Golden Horde in Eastern Europe, an autonomous spoken Russian language, largely independent from written Church Slavonic, began to develop.
[6] After the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, the vernacular language of the conquered peoples remained firmly Slavic.
[citation needed] Turko-Mongol borrowings in Russian relate mostly to commerce and the military:[citation needed] On the other hand, Ruthenian or Chancery Slavonic developed as a separate written form out of Old Church Slavonic, influenced by various local dialects and used in the chancery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which came to dominate the western and southern lands of Rus'.
[9][10] After the Golden Horde gradually disintegrated in the late 15th and early 16th century, both the political centre and the predominant dialect in European Russia came to be based in Moscow.
[11] The official language in Russia remained a kind of Church Slavonic until the close of the 18th century, but, despite attempts at standardization, as by Meletius Smotrytsky in c. 1620, its purity was by then strongly compromised by an incipient secular literature.
Modern Russian literature is considered to have begun in the 17th century, with the autobiography of Avvakum and a corpus of chronique scandaleuse short stories from Moscow.
[citation needed] Church Slavonic remained the literary language until the Petrine age (1682–1725), when its usage shrank drastically to biblical and liturgical texts.
Legal acts and private letters had been, however, already written in pre-Petrine Muscovy in a less formal language, more closely reflecting spoken Russian.
The first grammar of the Russian language was written by Vasily Adodurov in the 1740s,[citation needed] and a more influential one by Mikhail Lomonosov in 1755 (Rossijskaja grammatika).
[citation needed] At the same time, there began explicit attempts to fashion a modern literary language as a compromise between Church Slavonic, the native vernacular, and the style of Western Europe.
The writers Lomonosov, Derzhavin, and Karamzin made notable efforts in this respect, but, as per the received notion, the final synthesis belongs to Pushkin and his contemporaries in the first third of the 19th century.
Spurred perhaps by the so-called Slavophilism, some terms from other languages fashionable during the 18th century now passed out of use (for example, виктория [vʲɪˈktorʲɪjə] > победа [pɐˈbʲɛdə], 'victory'), and formerly vernacular or dialectal strata entered the literature as the "speech of the people".
But the authoritarian nature of the regime, the system of schooling it provided from the 1930s, and not least the often unexpressed yearning among the literati for the former days ensured a fairly static maintenance of Russian into the 1980s.
Indeed, while literacy became nearly universal, dialectal differentiation declined, especially in the vocabulary: schooling and mass communications ensured a common denominator.
In that year the Orthographic commission of the Institute of the Russian language (Academy of Sciences of the USSR), headed by Viktor Vinogradov, apart from the withdrawal of some spelling exceptions, suggested: The reform, however, failed to take root.
Political circumstances and the undoubted accomplishments of the superpower in military, scientific, and technological matters (especially cosmonautics), gave Russian a worldwide if occasionally grudging prestige, most strongly felt during the middle third of the 20th century.
Fall of the yers in progress or arguably complete (several words end with a consonant; кнѧжит 'to rule' < кънѧжити, modern княжить).
Yers generally given full voicing, unlike in the first printed edition of 1800, which was copied from the same destroyed prototype as the Catherine manuscript.
И колико дорогою нужды бысть, того всего много говорить, разве малая часть помянуть.
Есть среди них и такая, согласно которой каждому будет дано по его вере.
The modern phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic but underwent considerable innovation in the early historical period before it was largely settled by about 1400.
Some yers in weak position developed as if strong to avoid overly awkward consonant clusters: As shown, Czech and especially Polish are more tolerant of consonant clusters than Russian; but Russian is still more tolerant than Serbo-Croatian or Bulgarian: Proto-Slavic *mьglà "mist, haze" > мгла (mgla) (cf.
This vowel length survives (to varying extents) in Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Old Polish, but was lost entirely early in the history of Russian, with almost no remnants.
Pretty much the only reflex of the accentual type is found in the stress pattern of pleophonic sequences like CereC, CoroC, ColoC (where C = any consonant); see below.
The complex stress patterns of Russian nouns, verbs and short adjectives are a direct inheritance from Late Common Slavic, with relatively few changes.
Pleophony or "full-voicing" (polnoglasie, полногласие [pəlnɐˈɡlasʲɪje]) is the addition of vowels on either side of /l/ and /r/ in Proto-Slavic sequences like CorC where C = any consonant.
[20] When the yers were lost, the palatalization initially triggered by high vowels remained,[21] creating minimal pairs like данъ /dan/ ('given') and дань /danʲ/ ('tribute').
The depalatalization of *š *ž *c is largely not reflected in spelling, which still writes e.g. шить (šitʹ), rather than *шыть (šytʹ), despite the pronunciation [ʂɨtʲ].
The study, however, did not distinguish spelling from actual historical pronunciation, since it included loanwords in which consonants were written doubled but never pronounced long in Russian.
