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2006-12-25 - Review of the letters that have been decreted out of use. The order is from most recently deprecated to most outdated.
Author: Rusklaviatura
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Letters eliminated in 1918
Letters in disuse in the 18th century
The letter yat used to sound [ae:] although it evolved till being generally pronounced [je] at the moment of its abolition in Russia. It was called double yat', yat or double e depending on the language. The usual transliteration of this letter was the czech ě.
Yat was kept in the alphabet after the reform of Peter I, since it seemed to have an genuine pronunciation in the standard moscovite dialect. Later, around 1846, Lomonosov stated that the difference between yat and e was unappreciable. However, the distinction was kept in some non-urban dialects, which retained the letter in the alphabet.
By the moment of its elimination, yat was a devilish letter whose occurences children had to learn by heart. It was finally eliminated in the Reforms of Russian orthography in 1918, being substituted by e.
It survives in liturgical and church texts written in the Russian recension of Church Slavonic, and has since 1991 found some favour in ads and posters.
This letter is still present in diverse alphabets, such as Ukrainian, Belarusian, Kazakh, etc. The corresponding sound is the [i] as in Russian И. The origin can be found in Greek iota. On the other hand, the ancestor of И would be the greek letter η (eta). It was eliminated with the reform of 1918.
This dualiti is still present on the Modern Greek Language, where iota and eta have the same sound (except for the dipthongs that iota can form).
Fita descended from the Greek letter Theta. It was used for words with Greek origin, although Russians would pronounce it as ф (ef). An example would be the name Fyodor, which comes from Theodor. It was eliminated in 1918 and substituted by ф.
This f / th merge also occurs on some English dialects, such as Cockney.
It was used to represent upsilon (Υ, υ) in words derived from Greek (e.g. мѵро - myrrh), but its sound was the same as и. It became more rare during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The reform of 1918 did not mention Izhitsa, but by that time it was de facto out of the language. In most of the cases it has been substituted by и, but in somewords the sound correspond to в, as it happens on Modern Greek.
These letters were used in words with Greek origin but they have were gradually replaced by the digraphs кс and пс respectively. They are still usual in Church Slavonic.
It used to have the same sound as о, and it was commonly used until mid-eighteenth century. Nowadays it can be found in Church Slavonic.
Little and Big Yus represent the nasal vowels that have dissapeared from most Slavic languages. You can still find them in Polish as ę and ą respectively
Little Yus represents a front rounded nasal vowel, internationally referred to as [ɛ̃]. Both big and little Yus could appear in iotified form, which would be the equivalent soft vowels Ѩ, ѩ and Ѭ, ѭ. In this case the pronunciation would include a dipthong from /j/. It has been replaced by ю.
Big Yus is pronounced as nasalized back vowel, sounding [ɔ]. It has been merged with я.
This letter used to sound as /dz/ or /zʲ/. It was gradually merged with з during the 18th century. It is possible to find it in Macedonian as 'S'.
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