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The Russian spelling alphabet at right (PDF) The Russian spelling alphabet is a spelling alphabet (or "phonetic alphabet") for Russian, i.e. a set of names given to the alphabet letters for the purpose of unambiguous verbal spelling. It is used primarily by the Russian army, navy and the police.
Russian spelling, which is mostly phonemic in practice, is a mix of morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek , was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the models of French and German ...
Russian distinguishes hard (unpalatalized or plain) and soft (palatalized) consonants (both phonetically and orthographically). Soft consonants, most of which are denoted by a superscript ʲ , are pronounced with the body of the tongue raised toward the hard palate , like the articulation of the y sound in yes .
The Cyrillic alphabet and Russian spelling generally employ fewer diacritics than those used in other European languages written with the Latin alphabet. The only diacritic, in the proper sense, is the acute accent ́ (Russian: знак ударения 'mark of stress'), which marks stress on a vowel, as it is done in Spanish and Greek.
The story of the letter yat and its elimination from the Russian alphabet makes for an interesting footnote in Russian cultural history. See Reforms of Russian orthography for details. A full list of words that were written with the letter yat at the beginning of 20th century can be found in the Russian Wikipedia .
That spelling has a long history and is based on a folk etymology basing the word on ви́деть (to see,) instead of ве́дать (to know). In the closely related Belarusian, the original /o/ has merged with /a/, like in Standard Russian, but the reduced pronunciation is reflected in the spelling.
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Russian – and later Soviet – railroads operated locomotives with designations of "І", "Ѵ" and "Ѳ". (Although the letter Ѵ was not mentioned in the spelling reform, [8] [9] contrary to the statement in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, [10] it had already become very rare prior to the revolution.) Despite the altered orthography, the series ...