Re: "New World": Little Russia (Malaja Rus'), Texas

--- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Danny Wier wrote:
>
> > I wouldn't have it any other way.  If I were a Russian, I'd want to
> go
> > back the old orthography.  Well maybe except for all the final
> > hard-signs.
>
> The final hard signs are the least of it.  The worst part is all
> those
> pointless jat' characters, the locations of which just have to be
> memorized, and then the random contrasts like "mir" and "mIr" (with
> Ukrainian-style "i").
Doesn't one form of the word mean "peace" and the other "world"?  If
so, then different spellings would be a good idea.  Compare to English
"meet" and "meat", "see" and "sea"...

> I
> > also separate the two e's, the one that makes soft consonants and
> the
> > one that makes hard ones.  (I reckon the former is accomplished
> with
> > the letter Yat... ¿verdad?)
>
> The reversed "e" already does that, unless I don't understand your
> point.
It does.  But reversed E /E/ (not /jE/) is limited to loanwords and a
few native ones, most importantly the demonstratives "this": _etot_
(m), _eta_ (f), _eto_ (n), _eti_ (pl).  And I don't think the
distribution of Ye and Yat is arbitrary, since the two letters have
different values in Church Slavonic, if I remember correctly.  You have
the "square E" and "round E", the latter NOT being backwards, in
Ukrainian, and they carry the values /E/ and /jE/.

Daniil Pavlovich.

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