Откуда взялся русский язык

Where Russian Came From

C1 · Advanced · non-fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story

An advanced documentary reader on the Russian language itself. Where it sits on the Indo-European map and why the kinship is provable rather than poetic; the two Slavic alphabets, and why the one named after Cyril is not the one he made; the thousand-year cohabitation of a southern bookish language with a northern spoken one that left город and град behind; five datable waves of borrowing; and an honest account of why the grammar is hard — the hard parts being precisely the parts that survived.

Read Откуда взялся русский язык in Russian

Characters

Cyril and Methodius (Кирилл и Мефодий) — The brothers from Thessalonica
Peter the Great (Пётр Первый) — The reformer of the letterforms
The 1918 reform (Реформа 1918 года) — The decree that shortened the alphabet

Vocabulary from this story

язык — language
родство — kinship
ветвь — branch
семья — family
предок — ancestor
звук — sound
случайность — coincidence
азбука — alphabet
буква — letter
письменность — writing system
монах — monk
перевод — translation