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Although occasionally praised by the Russian working class, the reform was unpopular amongst the educated people, religious leaders and many prominent writers, many of whom were oppositional to the new state. [3] Furthermore, even the workers ridiculed the spelling reform at first, arguing it made the Russian language poorer and less elegant. [4]
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 phenomenon is called akanye (аканье), and some scholars postulate an early tendency towards it in the earliest known textual evidence of confusion between written "a" and "o" in a manuscript that was copied in Moscow in 1339. [3] Akanye contrasts with okanye (оканье) pronunciations in Standard Russian as follows:
one must never write the "hard" vowel ы, but must always replace it with its "soft" equivalent и, even though after ж and ш, и is pronounced as if it were written ы. Spelling Rule #2. After the velar consonants г, к, and х: the sibilant consonants ж, ч, ш, щ; and the hard consonant ц:
Unlike the Russian spelling system, ё is mandatory in the Cyrillic alphabet used by Dungan. In that Sinitic language, the е / ё distinction is crucial, as the former is used such as to write the syllable that would have the pinyin spelling of ye in Standard Chinese, and the latter is used for the syllable that appears as yao in pinyin.
In Russian, written confusion between the yat and е appears in the earliest records; when exactly the distinction finally disappeared in speech is a topic of debate. Some scholars, for example W. K. Matthews, have placed the merger of the two sounds at the earliest historical phases (the 11th century or earlier), attributing its use until 1918 ...
Among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed O" [1] or "o with stroke". Although these names suggest it is a ligature or a diacritical variant of the letter o , it is considered a separate letter in Danish and Norwegian, and it is alphabetized after z — thus x , y , z , æ , ø , and å .