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Thanks; that explains why it's used in Balkan and Central Asia, then.

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alon_68

It is true only for the Hebrew and Greek names that came to Russia with the Christianity. The Greek letter "Ββ" (betha) spelled "b" at the time when most Western European peoples had been Christened. However, at the time of the christening of Russia the pronunciation of this letter has already moved to "v" (as in the modern Greek). Thus, the Russians (and Romanians, BTW) accepted those names with the sound "v".

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I had no idea about Greek, thank you for explaining it.

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The Greek letter "Ββ" (betha) spelled "b" at the time when most Western European peoples had been Christened.

Wrong. This spelling had fallen into disuse several hundred years B.C., it was already 'vita' in Koine. It was rather a practice of Latin transliteration of Greek (since it used ancient letter values from the very moment of the first contacts with Greeks) which influenced Western European countries as a canonical territory of the Roman Patriarchate.

By the way, Russian used Byzantine pronunciation as a basis for virtually all Greek borrowings until Peter's reforms which introduced weird Erasmic (Ancient Greek) transcriptions for many terms of Greek origin (e.g. экономия instead of proper икономия — however, it's still used in Russian as a religious term and in Bulgarian in all meanings).

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khathi.livejournal.com

It's historical tradition. Cyrillic alphabet was derived from Greek, as was Latin, but as it was developed, actually, for Old Bulgarian language, it incorporated much of the language's traditions, like "в" pronunciation of Greek "beta" letter. I'm not very sure, but for what I now, New Greek has similar pronunciation, and until fairly recently there was significant argument on this matter among linguistic community.
So, as Old Bulgarian eventually become Old Church Slavonic, it strongly influenced other Slavic languages -- Russian as well, and these languages adopted same tradition. Thus come these differences, like Bethlehem-Вифлеем, as in West Latin mostly preserved Old Greek pronunciation tradition, with "b" for "beta".

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Thank you for the thorough explanation! Out of curiousity, do you know whether modern Bulgarian has retained more of the "old" language than other Slavonic languages have?

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Not exactly. It has been heavily influenced by Turkish, during Turkish occupation of Bulgaria (which lasted until 1870s,) and by Southwestern Slavic languages. Many grammatical categories, such as case, disappeared from modern Bulgarian, while they were present in Old Bulgarian (preserved until now in the form of Church Slavonic.) Present-day Bulgarian is very close to Macedonian and more or less close to Serbo-Croatian, but not to Russian or Ukrainian (though I would say that it's somehow closer to Russian than to Ukrainian.)

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So if Bulgarian and (Old) Church Slavonic both belong to the Eastern South Slavic group, would one say that Russian evolved from this group, or formed solely as an East Slavic language, together with e.g. Ukrainian and Belarusian?

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Modern Russian evolved from Old Russian (древнерусский язык), which definitely was an East Slavic language, but, during the process of its formation in 15th-18th centuries, it was also heavily influenced by Church Slavonic, which belonged to South Slavic group of languages. The influence is primarily lexical: the vocabulary of modern Russian includes hundreds of Church Slavonic words (or words evolved from Church Slavonic vocabulary.)

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Bulgarian, Macedonian and Church Slavonic belong to South Slavic group.

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It has been heavily influenced by Turkish

Not exactly. Bulgarians may resemble Turks in appearance ;-) but their language is influenced by Turkish in vocabulary only (to a certain extent), while in grammar it's more inspired by Greek, being a mamber of the balkanisch Sprachbund.

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Might be. I'm not that familiar with Greek. What I hear when in Bulgaria, though, is a lot of Turkic words in the language. To a certain extent, the system of "postpositioned articles" (I had no idea how it was called correctly) also reminded me of grammatically meaningful suffixes in, say, Tatar -- i mean all those "хайде да доплаваме до средата на езерото..." (let's swim to the middle of the lake)

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the system of "postpositioned articles" (I had no idea how it was called correctly) also reminded me of grammatically meaningful suffixes in, say, Tatar -- i mean all those "хайде да доплаваме до средата на езерото..."

Huh, it's rather early development — you can encounter the remnants of this phenomenon even in Russian, namely in the Northeastern dialects (e.g. Kostroma, Vologda and even Vladimir regions), where all three (masculine -от, feminine -та, and neuter -то) postpositional definite articles are still preserved and they even change according to cases (non-existent in Modern Bulgarian).

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crculver.livejournal.com

The narrative past tense in Bulgarian is usually ascribed to Turkish influence, so there has been morphological influence as well.

I don't know why you suggest that Greek is the origin of the Balkan sprachbund, and all other members are imitating it, because it's by no means that simple. See Brian Joseph's The Synchrony and Diachrony of the Balkan Infinitive (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521273188/3636363-20/104-2002403-8111902?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2) (Cambridge University Press, 1983) for various perspectives. Essentially, small changes in each of the languages ping-ponged off the others until we got to where we are today.

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Many thanks for the info.

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crculver.livejournal.com

So, as Old Bulgarian eventually become Old Church Slavonic

This is quite wrong, the only way this could be true is if it were the other way around, and even then, it's not that simple.

Sts Cyril and Methodius were from Thessaloniki, which was outside the Kingdom of Bulgaria and different culturally from the Slavs to the north (they had no Bolgar influences). They spoke a dialect which might as well be called "Old Macedonian (Slavic)", since they were living in Greek Macedonia (though this implies no connection to the modern language of the Republic of Macedonia). It is this Solun dialect that formed the basis for Old Church Slavonic, not anything Bulgarian.

Sts Cyril and Methodius went to Moravia, and the Kyiv Folia is a remnant of this activity. It is written in this nascent Old Church Slavonic, and there is nothing "Bulgarian" about it.

It was only after the expulsion from Moravia that Bulgaria plays any role, when the academies in Preslav and Ochrid were set up. However, this is many years after the creation of Old Church Slavonic.

"Old Bulgarian" is also a misnomer because modern Bulgarian is based on a noticealy different set of dialects than what you'll see in OCS. For example, when VRC groups were metathesized in the ancestor of modern Bulgarian, there was no lengthening like there was in OCS (compare "rob" to OCS "rabU")

English-speaking scholars abandoned the term "Old Bulgarian" decades ago and the only references to it you'll see in modern handbooks is an exhortation not to use it.

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khathi.livejournal.com

Well, I'm not a linguist, and popular books always tend to be quite dated. But the gist of it remains unchanged -- the Russian pronunciation is coming from newer Greek dialects, while western one has its roots in Latin, which preserved classical variant.

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shoomelka-mysh.livejournal.com

Азим is definitaly not Russian name, I believe it has Turkic etymology... Наврилов sounds more like Tatar surname

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Navrilov sounds like Turkic, though I know at least one Russian who bears that name (Yuri Navrilov, journalist.) Azim is a male name, very common in Turkic languages (Uzbek, Azerbaijani etc.)

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gera.livejournal.com

Also, note that in case of Яков it is actually pronounced in Russian exactly like the Hebrew original.
On the other hand, a name like Binyamin, for example, became in Russian Вениамин for the reasons explained above.

English kept the b, but misinterpreted the j (in all names), which stands for й-like sound in Hebrew names: Йаков, Йонатан, Йошуа, Йосеф etc.
Also, English uses b in cases where it actually should be v. It's the because the letter "beth" in Hebrew can produce either b or v sound depending on whether a special dot is present. In English it is always interpreted as b which sometimes doesn't correspond to the Hebrew originals either.

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What about when Russian uses V instead of U in Latin words? (avto, lingvo) Why is that?

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easy to pronounce

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This is coming from someone who lives in the Частнопредпринимательский сектор.

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I'm saying, Russians must think anything with less than three Хs is easy to prounounce.

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Nice and old joke with long beard.

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onodera.livejournal.com

Pronouncing vowel clusters containing no j-sound is usually hard for Russians. Hence штравус instead of страус (an example of an undereducated person's speech).

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If they can't pronounce "au" what do they say when they get hurt?

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I know that in Latin the spelling of U and V uses the same character (until Church Latin introduced letters U and J), but the pronunciation was still different.

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gera.livejournal.com

Apparently, the difference was lost in Cyrillic rendition.

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It doesn't matter at all, since Russian uses exactly the same spellings of the Biblicdal names as suggested by Greek (e.g. Μιχαήλ, Ιωσήφ) and doesn't invent anything more, except for some stress shifts and omitting nominative case endings where the Greeks have managed to attach them.

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crculver.livejournal.com

Russian masculine nouns originally had the nominative case ending, -ъ, which was cognate with the Greek -os (both derived from PIE *-os). Final yers were still pronounced in Russian as the original reduced back vowel until, some believe, the 13th century. Too bad the spelling reform after the revolution did away with the final back yer in writing.

Of course, one should note that in the case of OCS Петръ "Peter", the rounding of stressed e has changed the vocalism of the word noticeably, so that it is now Пётр.

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