Russian alphabet. How many letters are in the Russian alphabet How many letters are in the Russian language

S. Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya

It seems that any first-grader can give a competent answer to this question: of course, the alphabetical list “from A to Z” contains exactly 33 letters. However, what for a student is an indisputable, “elemental” truth, an axiom, for someone who is able to recall some facts from the history of our language and try to comprehend some trends in its development, becomes just a theory, which is not always confirmed by the practice of living use.

Let's start with the fact that in our first alphabet, created by Cyril and Methodius, there were many more letters - according to the manuscripts of the 11th century that have reached us. The Cyrillic alphabet included 43 characters. For, taking the Greek alphabet as a basis, the first-teacher brothers supplemented it with new letters specifically to convey by graphic means the specific sounds of Slavic speech: for example, Ж, Ш, ъ, ь, “yus big” and “yus small”.

To denote the same sound “I” in the Cyril and Methodius alphabet, there were as many as three graphemes. This was due to the fact that initially in the Russian alphabet they had different digital meanings: (“And octal”, or “like”) denoted the number 8; (“And decimal”) - the number 10; (“Izhitsa”) - the number 400. In addition, Izhitsa once denoted a special version of the sound “I”, close to the German “Ü”. Gradually, after the Slavs began to actively use Arabic and Latin numbers, these letters began to be perceived as redundant: the letter “and octal” was most often used, and began to be used mainly before vowels and before Y (this use of this letter was legalized in 1758. Academy of Sciences), Izhitsa - only in a few borrowed Greek words (mro, snod). Izhitsa and Izhitsa were finally excluded from our alphabet only in 1917. However, the letter also had one more role: it served as a semantically distinctive grapheme in the words “mir” (“harmony, absence of hostility”) and “mir” (“universe”).

For example, in the title of the novel by L.N. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, the author used an antonymous pair of words. After Tolstoy's death, in 1913, during the next re-release of the novel, an annoying typo was made: on the first page of the first volume, “mir” was printed in the title of the work.

However, historical changes in the “elementary truth” were not limited to the exclusion of symbols that had become unnecessary. Thus, with the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1735), new letters were added to the alphabet - E and Y (although unofficially “and short” 3 began to be used back in the 16th-17th centuries). Moreover, the appearance of the first was greeted very unfriendly. Writer A.P. Sumarokov called this letter a “freak”, and M.V. Lomonosov in “Russian Grammar” did not consider it necessary to include E in the alphabet, justifying his decision thus: “The newly invented or, more accurately, the old e, turned to the other side, is not necessary in the Russian language, because 1) the letter e<...>can serve both in the pronoun this and in the interjection her;<...>2) for foreign pronunciations, inventing new letters is a very unprofitable business ; 3) if we invent new letters for foreign accents, then our alphabet will be like Chinese.” And in fact, the letter E is used primarily in borrowed words (from Russian only in pronouns and interjections: this, this, ehma, evon, ege-ge ...). However, it is she who helps us correctly read such, for example, proper names as Euripides, Euclid, Hermitage

, in which the initial [e] is not preceded by [j], but Egypt, Europe - with [e] iotized, whereas before the appearance of E in our alphabet such a distinction was impossible. The need to introduce the letter Y into the Slavic alphabet, however, has also been repeatedly disputed by philologists. Thus, back at the end of the 17th century, the Slovenian scientist Yuri Krizanich drew attention to the fact that the letters b and J are never used in the same positions: b is possible only after consonants, and J only after vowels. And therefore he suggested using only b and writing edge, stand, drink

etc. Three centuries later, Roman Jakobson agreed with Krizhanich, in the article “Redundant letters in Russian writing” (1962) 4 who noted that if J were replaced by ь, the letter E would also become unnecessary, since writing lyot would make it possible to read and soft sound [l] and iotized [o]…<…>In an article dedicated to the new production at the Mariinsky Theater of Prokofiev’s opera “War and Peace,” the author, among other things, notes in parentheses: “... let us remember that the world in the title of the novel is completely antonymous with war, and society and, more broadly, the Universe” (“Literary newspaper", 2000, No. 12). That’s what it says: “let’s remember”!”

(N.A. Eskova. Popular and entertaining philology. M.: Flinta: Nauka, 2004).

3 Or more precisely, “and with a short one,” since this letter was composed of the letter I and a superscript character called “kratka.”
The importance of writing in the development of mankind is difficult to overestimate. Even in that era, when there was no trace of the alphabet, ancient people tried to express their thoughts in the form of rock inscriptions.

ABC of Elisabeth Boehm

First they drew figures of animals and humans, then - various signs and hieroglyphs. Over time, people managed to create easy-to-understand letters and put them into an alphabet. Who was the creator of the Russian alphabet? To whom do we owe the opportunity to express ourselves freely through writing?

Who laid the foundation of the Russian alphabet?

The history of the appearance of the Russian alphabet dates back to the 2nd millennium BC. Then the ancient Phoenicians came up with consonant letters and used them for quite a long time to compose documents.

In the 8th century BC, their discovery was borrowed by the ancient Greeks, who significantly improved the letter by adding vowels to it. Subsequently, it was the Greek alphabet, with the help of which statutory (solemn) letters were compiled, that formed the basis of the Russian alphabet.

Who created the Russian alphabet?

In the Bronze Age, Eastern Europe was inhabited by pre-Slavic peoples who spoke the same language.
Primer Slavonic writings of the Greatest Teacher B. Hieronymus of Stridon

Around the 1st century AD, they began to break up into separate tribes, as a result of which several states inhabited by the Eastern Slavs were created in these territories. Among them was Great Moravia, which occupied the lands of modern Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, partly Ukraine and Poland.

With the advent of Christianity and the construction of temples, people had a need to create a writing system that would allow them to record church texts. To learn to write, the Moravian prince Rostislav turned to the Byzantine emperor Michael III for help, and he sent Christian preachers Cyril and Methodius to Moravia. In 863, they came up with the first Russian alphabet, which was named after one of the preachers - the Cyrillic alphabet.

Cyril and Methodius were brothers originally from Thessaloniki (now Greek Thessaloniki). In those days, in their hometown, in addition to Greek, they spoke the Slavic-Thessalonica dialect, which formed the basis of the Church Slavonic language.

Initially, Cyril’s name was Konstantin, and he received his middle name just before his death, having taken a monastic vow. In his youth, Constantine studied with the best Byzantine teachers of philosophy, rhetoric, and dialectics, and later taught at Magnavra University in Constantinople.

Monument to Saints Cyril and Methodius in Saratov. Photo by Vasily Zimin.
In 863, going to Moravia, with the help of his brother Methodius, he created. Bulgaria became the center of the spread of Slavic writing. In 886, the Preslav Book School was opened on its territory, where they translated from Greek and rewrote the Cyril and Methodius originals. Around the same time, the Cyrillic alphabet came to Serbia, and at the end of the 10th century it reached Kievan Rus.

Initially, the first Russian alphabet had 43 letters. Later, 4 more were added to it, and the previous 14 were removed as unnecessary. At first, some of the letters resembled Greek ones in appearance, but as a result of spelling reform in the 17th century, they were replaced with those that we know today.

By 1917, there were 35 letters in the Russian alphabet, although in fact there were 37 of them, since E and J were not considered separate. Additionally, the alphabet contained the letters I, Ѣ (yat), Ѳ (fita) and V (Izhitsa), which later disappeared from use.

When did the modern Russian alphabet appear?

In 1917–1918, a major spelling reform was carried out in Russia, thanks to which the modern alphabet appeared. Its initiator was the Ministry of Public Education under the Provisional Government. The reform began before the revolution, but was continued after the transfer of power to the Bolsheviks.

Wikimedia Commons/Jimmy Thomas ()
In December 1917, Russian statesman Anatoly Lunacharsky issued a decree requiring all organizations to use a new alphabet consisting of 33 letters.

Although the spelling reform was prepared before the revolution and did not have any political background, at first it was criticized by opponents of Bolshevism. However, over time, the modern alphabet took root and is used to this day.

S. Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya

It seems that any first-grader can give a competent answer to this question: of course, the alphabetical list “from A to Z” contains exactly 33 letters. However, what for a student is an indisputable, “elemental” truth, an axiom, for someone who is able to recall some facts from the history of our language and try to comprehend some trends in its development, becomes just a theory, which is not always confirmed by the practice of living use.

Let's start with the fact that in our first alphabet, created by Cyril and Methodius, there were many more letters - according to the manuscripts of the 11th century that have reached us. The Cyrillic alphabet included 43 characters. For, taking the Greek alphabet as a basis, the first-teacher brothers supplemented it with new letters specifically to convey by graphic means the specific sounds of Slavic speech: for example, Ж, Ш, ъ, ь, “yus big” and “yus small”. However, some of the symbols of the Slavic alphabet turned out to be doublets: for example, the letters O, transferred by Cyril and Methodius from the Greek alphabet, conveyed different sounds of the Greek language, [O] short and [O] long, although these sounds did not differ in the Slavic languages. So already at the first stage of the existence of our alphabet, redundant letters appeared in it. 1

To denote the same sound “I” in the Cyril and Methodius alphabet, there were as many as three graphemes. This was due to the fact that initially in the Russian alphabet they had different digital meanings: (“And octal”, or “like”) denoted the number 8; (“And decimal”) - the number 10; (“Izhitsa”) - the number 400. In addition, Izhitsa once denoted a special version of the sound “I”, close to the German “Ü”. Gradually, after the Slavs began to actively use Arabic and Latin numbers, these letters began to be perceived as redundant: the letter “and octal” was most often used, and began to be used mainly before vowels and before Y (this use of this letter was legalized in 1758. Academy of Sciences), Izhitsa - only in a few borrowed Greek words (m ro, s nod). Izhitsa and Izhitsa were finally excluded from our alphabet only in 1917. However, the letter also had one more role: it served as a semantically distinctive grapheme in the words “mir” (“harmony, absence of hostility”) and “mir” (“universe”). For example, in the title of the novel by L.N. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, the author used an antonymous pair of words. After Tolstoy's death, in 1913, during the next re-release of the novel, an annoying typo was made: on the first page of the first volume, “mir” was printed in the title of the work. And although in all other volumes of this edition the title was reproduced correctly, in accordance with the author’s will, the typo served as a source for a very common misconception that Tolstoy mentioned peace as a universe in the novel, and not peace as the opposite of war. 2 But with the title of the poem by V.V. Mayakovsky's "War and Peace", which was conceived by the poet as a spelling antithesis to the title of Tolstoy's novel, an incident of the opposite nature occurred - after a letter was excluded from the alphabet, the meaning of the title had to be explained in the comments...

The fight against “extra” letters occurred throughout the history of Russian orthography: some of them were excluded from the alphabet as a result of the reforms of Peter I (1708-1710) and the Russian Academy of Sciences (1735) (then the symbols “zelo” disappeared from the alphabet) and “yusy”), the other part - during the spelling reform of 1917-1918, when our alphabet lost letters such as, .

However, historical changes in the “elementary truth” were not limited to the exclusion of symbols that had become unnecessary. Thus, with the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1735), new letters were added to the alphabet - E and Y (although unofficially “and short” 3 began to be used back in the 16th-17th centuries). Moreover, the appearance of the first was greeted very unfriendly. Writer A.P. Sumarokov called this letter a “freak”, and M.V. Lomonosov in “Russian Grammar” did not consider it necessary to include E in the alphabet, justifying his decision thus: “The newly invented or, more accurately, the old e, turned to the other side, is not necessary in the Russian language, because 1) the letter e<...>can serve both in the pronoun this and in the interjection her; 2) for foreign pronunciations, inventing new letters is a very unprofitable business<...>; 3) if we invent new letters for foreign accents, then our alphabet will be like Chinese.” And in fact, the letter E is used primarily in borrowed words (from Russian only in pronouns and interjections: ; 3) if we invent new letters for foreign accents, then our alphabet will be like Chinese.” And in fact, the letter E is used primarily in borrowed words (from Russian only in pronouns and interjections:...). However, it is she who helps us correctly read such, for example, proper names as Euripides, Euclid, Hermitage, in which the initial [e] is not preceded by [j], but Egypt, Europe - with [e] iotized, whereas before the appearance of E in our alphabet such a distinction was impossible.

The need to introduce the letter Y into the Slavic alphabet, however, has also been repeatedly disputed by philologists. Thus, back at the end of the 17th century, the Slovenian scientist Yuri Krizanich drew attention to the fact that the letters b and J are never used in the same positions: b is possible only after consonants, and J only after vowels. And therefore he suggested using only b and writing edge, stand, drink etc. Three centuries later, Roman Jakobson agreed with Krizhanich, in the article “Redundant letters in Russian writing” (1962) 4 who noted that if J were replaced by ь, the letter E would also become unnecessary, since writing lyot would make it possible to read and soft sound [l] and iotized [o]…

The letter E, which became the youngest symbol of the Russian alphabet, was officially approved on November 18, 1783 by the decision of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by Princess Ekaterina Dashkova. Before this, a digraph was introduced in 1735 to indicate the stressed [O] after soft consonants, and they wrote, for example, сiô, сliôzy.

1 This is stated, for example, in the article by D. Yazykov “Notes on some Russian letters”, where the author, outlining the history of the creation of the Slavic alphabet, notes: “Giving complete justice to the father of our letters<...>, however, it must be admitted that he transferred the following [letters] from the Greek alphabet to ours. - S. D-D.], which there on their own or in combination with others had different reprimands, but here we received the same / , /, and others that could be composed / , /. This is what made our Slavic spelling extremely difficult” (Tsvetnik. 1809. Part 2. No. 4. P. 55-81) (For more information about this, see our article “On the history of the Russian alphabet”).

2 “In our time, with his desire to revise everything and everyone, this version has even become fashionable. No, no, and you will find statements in periodicals in favor of a “deeper” understanding of Tolstoy’s novel.<…>In an article dedicated to the new production at the Mariinsky Theater of Prokofiev’s opera “War and Peace,” the author, among other things, notes in parentheses: “... let us remember that the world in the title of the novel is completely antonymous with war, and society and, more broadly, the Universe” (“Literary newspaper", 2000, No. 12). That’s what it says: “let’s remember”!” (N.A. Eskova. Popular and entertaining philology. M.: Flinta: Nauka, 2004).

3 Or more precisely, “and with a short one,” since this letter was composed of the letter I and a superscript character called “kratka.”

4 Selected writing, 1962, I.

But from the official approval of the letter E to its replication on the printing press, twelve whole years passed - the first book using it, “And My Trifles” by I.I. Dmitriev, was published only in 1795. But L.N. Tolstoy was less fortunate: due to the reluctance of the printing house to tinker with the production of the letter E, the author was unable to preserve the correct spelling of the surname of the hero of the novel “Anna Karenina”. Tolstoy named him Levin, using his own name for this, but instead the printing house typed in a completely different surname - Levin. And to this day this letter occupies the position of an orphan foster child in the Russian alphabet family.

According to the “Rules of Russian Spelling and Punctuation”, Yo is obligatory for use only in the following cases:
1. When it is necessary to prevent incorrect reading and understanding of a word, for example: we recognize in contrast to we recognize, everything in contrast to everything; bucket as opposed to bucket; perfect (participle) as opposed to perfect (adjective), etc.
2. When you need to indicate the pronunciation of a little-known word, for example: Olekma river.
3. In special texts: primers, school textbooks of the Russian language, spelling textbooks, etc., as well as in dictionaries to indicate the place of stress and correct pronunciation.”

However, these rules are often ignored by publishers. And try to guess what exactly the creators of such headlines and names had in mind: “Everything for the home”, “Everything for the dacha”, “ We have everything for you», « Everything in the Kremlin is like 100 years ago», « Fighting bulls will be sent to heifers", milk "Tema" ... And here is another curiosity related to the use of the letter E - one might say, a curiosity squared. In the final lines of Anna Kuznetsova’s review of Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novel “Sincerely Yours Shurik”, published in the Neva magazine (2004, No. 10), the following is literally written: “ The surprise that miraculously penetrated this text, ideally protected from artistic infection, is hisfuckingdialect. No, no, and you will come across inexplicable, incomprehensible how one-dimensional typos were formed on these pages: no matter how many times a Cuban is mentioned in the text, he will be characterized as “dark-skinned.” “Tears” is spelled “tears” here. There are also such delights as “all other obstacles”, “it’s easy to get up from the table”, pleasant warmth”..." And the reader of the review is not only unlikely to understand the critic’s bewilderment, but he himself will remain perplexed: what’s strange about the fact that “with tears” is written as “tears”, what “exquisite” could the critic see in “ dark-skinned Cuban" or " pleasant warmth"?.. Until he opens the book itself by L. Ulitskaya (M.: Eksmo Publishing House, 2004) and discovers that in this publication (unlike the Neva magazine) the letter E is consistently used and that according to the principle of “outposts” “If a fool prays to God, he’ll even break his forehead” through E are printed here and words such as “with tears”, “dark-skinned”, “easy”, “warmth”... The only thing that remains is that, using a quote from the book by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya that is appropriate to the topic, exclaim " Yo moyo"! 6

The misadventures of this letter, which occupies the “seventh and, of course, sanctified position” among the “blessed number of star letters of our alphabet,” allowed the authors of the book “Two Centuries of the Russian Letter E. History and Dictionary” (M., 2000) B.V. Pchelov and V.T. Chumakov to call it “one of the symbols of the Russian mentality.”

It is not for nothing that such a significant event was the celebration of the 220th anniversary of the letter E, organized by the St. Petersburg Museum of City History. And in Ulyanovsk, the homeland of the famous writer and historian N.M. Karamzin, who for a long time was considered the inventor of this letter sign (although in fact he only used Yo when printing the collection “Aonids” in 1796), a monument to this letter was recently erected 7 ... And the ranks of “yofikators” - zealots - are growing consistent use of Yo. For, as one of them, Igor Sid, declares, “the letter e, this, according to the definition of essayist Vladimir Berezin, “the only umlaut of the Russian language,” is increasingly disappearing from our lives. Meanwhile, she personifies everything living (warm, cheerful, cool, smart, bantering, unlucky, light, heavy, yellow, green, hard, reliable, tearful, scabrous, curious knowledge, serious knowledge, scrupulous knowledge, etc.) that is in language.”

In an exceptional situation, even today the creator of a work of art has to try on the role of the “father of letters,” like St. Cyril, creating, “constructing” new graphemes capable of conveying specific sounds, the need for which is determined by the text itself. Thus, in A. Blok’s poem “It was an autumn evening...” the grapheme ö appears in the word “sor” ( The guest tiredly sat down on the chair by the fire, / And the dog lay down on the carpet at his feet. / The guest politely said: “Isn’t that enough for you yet?/ It's time to humble yourself before the Genius of Fate, sir."), which sounded with the poet “Turgenev’s sound,<…>with a French touch, in the old noble style.” 8 The poet called this sound “Turgenevsky” because the grapheme ö is used in the novel by I.S. Turgenev’s “Spring Waters” to convey the peculiarities of the speech of one of the characters (“ his comrade stopped him again, saying: “Dongof, be quiet!"). About the fact that now the letter sign ö has already outgrown the framework of an occasional artistic symbol and has actually become an equal member of the modern Russian alphabet, as evidenced by its use, for example, on music festival posters “ Elimusic"(transcription of the English language "Earlymusik"), first held in April 2002. The creators of this term with such a spelling wanted to emphasize not only the novelty of the musical phenomenon itself (“the concept of “ancient music” smells of mothballs, and the festival organizers are focused on young people” 9), but also its actual Russian origin.

So, as a result of the reform of 1917-1918. 33 letters received permanent registration as part of our alphabet, and until recently the old graphemes could only be seen on a few monuments of the pre-October period that escaped destruction.

5 So (“not”) in the text of the review, although in accordance with the spelling norm the intensifying particle “neither” should be used here. Well, let’s take this as “an inexplicable typo, it’s unclear how it was formed”...

6 Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Wild animal tales. M., Eksmo, 2003. P. 40.

7 The creation of this monument marked the beginning of a whole series of similar events: for example, in 2003 in Polotsk they decided to immortalize the letter “u short”, which exists only in the Belarusian alphabet, and in 2004 a monument to the letter Y was erected in Yekaterinburg. The spirit of the times is an attempt to express the internal through the external, content through form, spirit through the letter...

8 Korney Chukovsky. Alexander Blok as a person and poet. Pg., 1924.

9 Petersburg on Nevsky. 2003, No. 11.

An alphabet is a series of written signs arranged in a constant order and conveying most fully and accurately some of the sound elements that make up the speech of a particular people. Every schoolchild now knows how many letters are in the Russian alphabet. But what is its story?

History of the alphabet

The alphabet dates back to ancient times, and it originally appeared among the Phoenicians, when they, having occupied the Nile Delta, were able to get acquainted with Egyptian hieroglyphs. The oldest recorded alphabet appeared approximately 1000 years before the birth of Christ. However, some scholars consider the inscription on the monument of the Moabite king to be even older than the above date. After the Phoenicians, the alphabet appeared among the Greeks. The latter left the shape of the letters almost unchanged, even their sound, order and names were retained. But some signs still turned out to be superfluous, and for a certain part of Greek speech there were no symbols, so some were removed and others were added. All subsequent ones originated from the Greek alphabet, gradually adapting to local languages ​​(Etruscan, Os, Latin, Umbrian, Albanian). The Latin alphabet took root almost everywhere and quickly spread throughout the world. The main signs have not changed practically anywhere, but secondary ones have arisen - superscript or subscript, since different nationalities had their own requirements if there were not enough sounds to correctly convey the sounds of speech on paper.

Features of alphabets

Today there are already dozens of alphabets in the world. They differ in appearance, in origin and in the principle of correspondence between sound and letter. Most alphabets have from 20 to 30 letters, but they also have 12 and 50 characters. Some use modification of letters with the help of various marks or a combination of several characters.

Logograms

Logograms became a very important contribution to writing. Thanks to them, the recording of linguistic units began to attract attention precisely to the sound, and not to the pictorial image. This was essential for those words that cannot be replaced by pictures (pronouns, suffixes, prepositions and prefixes). But here some difficulties arose. The reader could not always determine what the drawing meant - sound or image. In addition, the number of some characters in logographic writing is very large (for example, among the Chinese it is in the thousands). In addition, for the symbols that were depicted in drawings, the accuracy of the image itself was necessary, and it was often very difficult to reproduce them.

ABC

The alphabet came from the Greek version of the alphabet, and the word itself was made up of its first letters: alpha and beta. In the Slavic version - az and beeches. It is believed that the names of the Slavic letters were invented by Cyril in the 9th century, wanting them to be not just a meaningless set of sounds, but to have their own meaning. Then the alphabet was developed by the brothers Cyril and Methodius. It spread very quickly throughout the Slavic countries and to this day is their unchanging alphabet.

Russian alphabet

It is quite difficult to say now how many letters were in the Russian alphabet initially, since it was modified many times (some letters were added, others were removed). Establishing their exact initial number is quite problematic. The alphabet has been subject to modification throughout its existence. For example, Peter I decided to completely remove letters from it, which he simply considered unnecessary. He removed the letter “psi” from the alphabet and put the double and triple designations of sounds in order. "Omega", "earth" and "izhitsa" were also removed.

One could count how many letters there were in the Russian alphabet after the deletion that Peter made, but he did not stop there and after some time added the “missing ones.” The well-known “e” and “ya” were added, which the king officially legalized. Later (after the revolution of 1917), the Russian language underwent so-called Europeanization, and some letters from it disappeared forever.

Princely fun

In general, it is possible to count how many letters there have ever been in the Russian alphabet several times, since it has been constantly changing since ancient times. Some letters consisted of entire words or a combination of several characters. As a result, it turned out that the alphabet could contain 37 letters in one Russian principality, and at the same time 50 or even more in another. In times of fragmentation of the state, each prince tried to be different from his neighbor in some way, sometimes even in this way.

Reforms in the alphabet

Research into the history of the Russian alphabet has shown that there are a lot of “blank spots” in it, around which endless disputes arise, and they are still relevant to this day. Even the graphics and their alphabetical part have undergone many changes, which are not yet fully detailed. Particular attention can be paid to the letter “е”. If we rely on historical facts, then she has always aroused great interest, since she was in a “homeless” situation. The scientific basis for the fact that this letter is really needed in the alphabet has been given by many outstanding linguists. There is even a book dedicated exclusively to her. It describes not only the history of the origin of the letter “ё”, but also the rationale for its necessity, and also provides a list of words with it. In online communities to this day, the use of this letter is constantly discussed, which leads to heated debates.

If we turn to the history of the reform of the alphabet in Rus', then the Slavic letter, unlike its Western European counterpart, was constantly developing, following the modification of the language as a system. Moreover, until the 18th century, development occurred spontaneously, and after that - in the form of government reforms. The most important of the latter were carried out during periods of great restructuring in society. For example: Peter's reform, Soviet reform. In the interval between them, three more small ones were carried out concerning Russian writing. They had a great influence on Russian graphics. Changes in the Russian language in history can be divided into three categories: in alphabetical composition, punctuation and spelling, and graphic.

Depth of reforms

The alphabet became more or less established after the reforms of Peter the Great. Then, according to the emperor, he counted 9 “unnecessary” letters, which were successfully “cut out”. Then Peter I carried out a reform of graphics, which played an important role in Russian writing. The reform had a huge impact on the future of the alphabet and entailed a number of subsequent changes that were carried out by the Academy of Sciences. The latter excluded a number of letters, but returned some of those removed by Peter I, moreover, restored Izhitsa, which was almost never used in writing.

Some reforms affected a group of letters whose sounds have changed over the course of history. This applies to hard and soft signs. Having lost their sound meaning, they began to mean hardness or softness. The exclusion of the letters “er” and “yat” caused resistance from the intelligentsia. Books printed without them were associated with the new regime, and the new spelling seemed to many to be a gross violation of literacy. Therefore, printing houses often printed publications based on the old spelling. Representatives of the new government periodically forcibly confiscated typesetting letters with “er” and “yat”. This led to the fact that after the revolution an apostrophe was often used instead of “er”.

So how many letters are there?

It was at this time that it was interesting to count the number of letters in the Russian alphabet, since some of the texts were printed with the old set of letters, and some with the new one. Many “enemies of Soviet power” did not recognize the new spelling, and publications published abroad by Russians were printed in the old way.

Solzhenitsyn, in his own words, “spoke with disgust” about the new spelling and, at the slightest opportunity, wrote using the old one. Today we can say with confidence how many letters are in the Russian alphabet. There are 33 of them in total.

In writing we use letters, in speaking we use sounds. We use letters to represent the sounds we pronounce. There is no simple and direct correspondence between letters and sounds: there are letters that do not denote sounds, there are cases when a letter means two sounds, and cases when several letters mean one sound. Modern Russian has 33 letters and 42 sounds.

Kinds

Letters are vowels and consonants. The letters soft sign and hard sign do not form sounds; there are no words in the Russian language that begin with these letters. The Russian language is “vocal”; Russian words have many vowels (o, e, i, a) and voiced consonants (n, l, v, m, r). There are significantly fewer noisy, deaf, hissing ones (zh, ch, sh, shch, c, f). The vowels yu, e, ё are also rarely used. On a letter, instead of the letter е, the letter e is often written without losing the meaning.

Alphabet

The letters of the Russian language are listed below in alphabetical order. Uppercase and lowercase letters are shown and their names are indicated. Vowels are marked in red, consonants are in blue, letters ь, ъ are in grey.

A a B b C c D d E d e e e f f g h h i i j j K k L l M m N n O o P p R r S s T t U u F f X x C t H h Sh sh sch q y y b ee y y I

The letter L is called "el" or "el", the letter E is sometimes called "E reverse".

Numbering

Numbers of letters of the Russian alphabet in forward and reverse order: