Search Results

Ь and ъ were alway distinguished in Protoslavic, long before Slavs came into contact with Uralic peoples. The reduced vowel ь developed from the PIE short *ĭ, the reduced vowel ъ developed from the PI …

Analytical vs. synthetic is more like a spectrum than the two possible states, some languages are more analytical than the others, some languages are very synthetic, but no absolutely analytical or ab …

In the Old Church Slavonic language (OCS), the little yus Ѧ represented a nasalized front vowel, possibly [ɛ̃], and is traditionally transliterated as <ę>, while the little iotified yus Ѩ, as it is cl …

The question would be better asked as “When did the OCS ЪИ become ЪІ and when did ЪІ become Ы?” The three variants were originally used interchangeably, but later Ы took over, the most obvious reasons …

Yes, Old Church Slavonic (OCS) was an artificial language, but just in a way. Firstly, in the 9th century, when Cyrill and Methodius devised the OCS, all the Slavic languages and dialects were so clo …

When it goes for speaking/understanding Slavic languages, most Russians know only Russian and have practically never been exposed to other Slavic languages, especially spoken ones, while most Belarusi …

The suffix -izm is borrowed from Greek via Latin, it's not native Polish, but in the Polish native words z is palatalized to ź [ʑ] before a palatalized m (mi/mie), cf.: wezmę ‘I will take’ with z be …

Old Novgorodian <г> was plosive [g], and Zaliznyak in his treatise explicitly states it, this feature cannot be avoided to be mentioned, especially in such a fundamental work as Zaliznyak’s. The Sourc …

There has never been any sound u before the syllabic sonorant l in the Slavic words for “wolf” and “full”. Proto-Balto-Slavic (PBS) *wilkás (“wolf”) and *pilnas (“full”) begat Proto-Slavic (PS) *vĭ̯l …

Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages are called satem languages, because in them the Proto-Indo-European palatovelars *ḱ, *ǵ, and *ǵʰ developed into sibilants or affricats, usually into [s]/[z]- or …

The letter <j> is really used in some Cyrillic-based alphabets, all of them were once created either by a certain person or by a group of people, that is, these alphabets aren't a product of natural e …

You are absolutely right, the change N > M is due to the influence of Michael. That happened not only in Polish, but also in Ukrainian: Микола, Миколай (Mykola, Mykolaj) Belarusian: Мікалай (Mikala …

Dialects don't necessarily imply mutual non-understanbility. In the XIX century most Russians were peasants, village folks, 95% illiterate, everyone spoke the way their village fellows spoke. Just rea …

The contact of Slavs with the Celtic people was very long ago, in the 4th - 2nd centuries BC, in the times when the Proto-Slavic language still existed, the few Slavic words that can be explained by t …

There is the official site of the Siberian language, Сибирска вольгота, with its grammar, Russian-Siberian dictionary, and texts in that language.