Translating old Russian

[quem98.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to translate a decree of Catherine the Great.

How would one translate Приняв за благо ваше предствление ваше, чтоб Мулл и проче духовные чны магометынскаго закона между народами, оный в империи нашей исповtдующими, определялись не инако, как по учинении им надлежащаго испытания и с утверждения наместнbческаго правленя...
The sentence goes on for another ten lines.

I can't quite figure out the construction

"implementing your presentation for the greater good?" Or something like that?

Comments

[kart.livejournal.com]

Ok, maybe "soft" isn't the right term. For whatever reason, г ends up getting pronounced as a в in -ого words and some other words like чего.

I guess it's wrong to call this sound shift "soft"?

What I wanted to know was: why does Modern Russian use г in words that obviously are not pronounced with a normal г sound? Looking at Slavonic, Bulgarian, etc, it's plain to see that the -ого is pronounced with a hard г in other related languages. To further confuse things there's the ordinary H-sounding "soft" mutation, as in southern accents.

It seems like, long ago, words spelled with -ого were pronounced o-g-o. Then over time two (maybe three?) changes crept into the language:
1. unstressed "о" sounds like "а"
2. г softens to х/h (but not everywhere, not sure, help?)
3. г in -ого and related phonemes mutates into в... but did this shift come directly from hard г or did it come by way of the softened х/h mutation?

[halevi.livejournal.com]

In Modern Russian "г" in final "-ого" in adjectives is commonly prononced as "в". There are some exceptions, but "в" is a common rule, and this way never will be a mistaken: no exception is mandatory.

As far as I can guess, final "-аго" in Old Russian is pronounced in the same way. This conclusion comes from some poems of M.Lomonosov, where, e.g. "краснаго" is rhymed with "иваново". ("Иваново" means "related to Ivan").

As far as I know, final "-аго" in Russian writing went from the Old Slavonic orthography, which is the common source of the Russian writing tradition.