“ate,” like e in “yell”: e and ъ̌ (ě) are now indistinguishable, except that accented e before a hard consonant 'has a tendency to be pronounced jo, e.g. s′ elŭ, “of villages,” is pronounced s′ ol, but sělŭ, “sat,” s′ el: е = jo is sometimes denoted by ё.
VI. Great Russian has kept g where Little Russian (Lit. R.) and Wh. R., like Čech and High Sorb, now have h.
VII. A specially Russian point is that Proto-Sl. je and ju beginning a word, appear in R. as o and u; O.S. jedinǔ, “one,” jutro, “morning,” R. odinŭ, utro.
VIII. Russian has lost the distinctions of quantity which survive in Čech and S. Slav., but its accent is free as in S. Slav. The accent is extremely capricious, often falling differently in different cases of the same noun, or persons of the same tense, also it is an expiratory accent, so strong that the unaccented syllables are much slurred over and their vowels dulled. In learning Russian it is therefore most important to pay great attention to the accent, and at first to read accented texts.
The above phonetic peculiarities have marked Russian as far back as we can trace it. In the earliest documents it appears with an apparatus of grammatical forms practically identical with that ascribed to primitive Slavonic. The history of the language is not so much that of its phonetic decay as that of its morphological simplification and syntactic development. The tracing of this process is rendered difficult by the fact that O.S. was the ecclesiastical and literary language until the 17th century, and though in the end the O.S. texts suffer modifications, producing the Russian form of Church Slavonic, it is only by accident that the Russian forms appear in them. Russian is better represented in additions made by the scribe, as in the colophon of the Ostromir gospel (A.D. 1056/57), the oldest dated O.S. MS. In a certain number of legal documents dating from the 12th century onwards Russian forms definitely predominate, but the subject-matter is too limited to offer much material.
Borrowings.—The effect of the Church language upon Russian has been very strong, comparable to that of Latin upon French or English: O.S. forms of words and suffixes, betrayed by their phonetic peculiarities though pronounced more or less à la russe, have in some cases ousted the native forms, in other cases the two exist side by side; the Slav. form generally has the more dignified or metaphorical, the Russian the simpler and more direct sense: even some of the grammatical terminations (e.g. pres. part. act.; certain forms of the adj., &c.) are Slavonic; but speakers are quite unconscious of using anything that is not Russian (see S. Bulič, Church Slavonic Elements in Modern Russian, St P., 1893), and not till the 18th century did even grammarians understand the difference. Less important elements have been the Tatar which gave names for many Oriental things such as weapons, jewels, stuffs, garments and some terms concerned with government, and the Polish, which during the 17th century supplied many terms needed to express European things and ideas. In the 18th century such importations were made from Latin and all the Western European languages, in Peter's time mostly from German and Dutch (for nautical terms, English supplied some), in Catherine's rather from French, which had become the language of the aristocracy. During the first quarter of the 19th century modern Russian found itself and discarded superfluous Slavonic and European borrowings alike. Since then fresh loan-words have mostly belonged to the international quasi-Greek terminology, though like German R. sometimes prefers analogous compounds made from its own roots.
Literary Russian as spoken by educated people throughout the empire is the Moscow dialect (see below) modified by these influences. It is still a highly inflected language, comparable in that respect rather to Latin and Greek than to the languages of western Europe, though during historic time it has lost many of the grammatical forms whose full development we can study in O.S., and whose presence we can assert in the scanty remains of Old R. This process has relieved it of the dual number, save for certain survivals; in the nouns, of the vocative case (save for certain ecclesiastical forms), and many of the distinctions between the declensions, especially in the plural, the oblique cases of the simple, and the more cumbrous forms of the compound, adjective; in the verbs, of the supine, the imperfect, the aorist and the conditional (now reduced to a particle); but this simplification leaves it with six cases, Nom., Acc., Gen., Dat., Instrumental and Locative, three genders, three substantial declensions, -a, -o, -i, and traces of -u and consonantal stems, a special pronominal declension with many tricky forms, an adjective which takes its place between them, and a system of numerals in which a compromise between grammar and logic has produced a kind of maze. The forms of the verb are easier, as only the present indic. has three persons, the imperat. has but the 2nd, and the past is a participle, which, having discarded the copula, distinguishes only gender and number. The infinitive and four participles offer no special difficulty, but the gerundives or verbal adverbs, from the old masc. nom. sing., are troublesome. The curious mechanism by which these few verbal forms are by means of the aspects made to express most of our tenses and other shades of meaning of which even English is incapable, is briefly explained under Slavs. On the whole the syntax is simple, the periods which imitation of Latin and German once brought into fashion having given place to the shorter sentences of French and English models.
Such a language, though less difficult than it is generally supposed, is learned much better if some preliminary study is devoted to the accidence, before the student launches out into conversation, as otherwise the habit may be acquired of disregarding the terminations and speaking very incorrectly.
Dialects.—Russian dialects fall into two main divisions—Great (Velikorusskij), including White (Bělorusskij) Russian, and Little Russian (Malorusskij). The latter is spoken in a belt reaching from Galicia and the Northern Carpathians (see Ruthenians) through Podolia and Volhynia and the governments of Kíev, Chernígov, Poltáva, Khárkov and the southern part of Vorónezh to the Don and the Kubán upon which the Dněpr Cossacks were settled. To the south of this belt in “New Russia” the population is much mixed, but Little Russians on the whole predominate. In all there must be about 30,000,000 Little Russians.
The Great Russian division includes all other Russian speakers—the main body to the N. and E. of the Little Russians, the settlers in Siberia, the Caucasus and along the southern coast, the educated classes, officials and many townsmen throughout the empire, probably not less than 70,000,000 speakers exclusive of White Russians. On the whole it is very conservative, and therefore, in spite of its vast extent, is wonderfully uniform. It falls into two main dialect groups—the northern or o group and the southern or a group. The line between them runs roughly E.S.E. from Pskov to the Oka and then eastwards to the Urals. The northern group is the more conservative and pronounces very nearly according to the spelling, unaccented o remaining o, but o is in general rather like u, while e before hard consonants is apt to be jo and before soft consonants i. The southern part of this group, comprising most of the governments of Vladímir and Yaroslávl with adjoining parts of Tver and Kostromá, are alone free from a further peculiarity, a tendency to mix up c and č which can be traced in the ancient documents of Nóvgorod and has spread with the Nóvgorod colonists across the whole of N. Russia to the Urals and Siberia. These distant dialects have adopted many words from the Ugro-Finnish natives. The southern or a group of dialects pronounces unaccented o, e and even i as a or ja; with this goes a tendency to pronounce g as h, and to mix up u and v. The Moscow dialect, which is the foundation of the literary language, and White Russian, are both best classed with the a dialect.
The Moscow dialect really covers a very small area, not even the whole of the government of Moscow, but political causes have made it the language of the governing classes and hence of literature. It is a border dialect, having the southern pronunciation of unaccented o as a, but in the jo for accented e
