FastLife

I was wondering if any one can explain why the letter Ё is not used uniformly in written Russian. I was learning a song in russian the other day when my Russian speaking girlfriend started correcting all these words that I had gone to great pains to pronouce as written. It seems that ё is more commonly written interchangeably as e, even though they are different letters with different pronunciations.

I have found a bit on information on the net about this but a good explanation for it would be helpful.

Joe Gold

Well, most of us, who aren't natives, have problems with this. In theory, ë shoul always be written with the dots, though Russians (as far as I understood) have the tendency not to write them, unless it makes a difference (ex. bcë and bce). It is mainly because they usually know allready, which letter it is.

FastLife

That would be understandable if ë was just an accented letter, but it is a completely different letter with a different sound and the meanings of the words are different if you don't use the right one. It is like if in English you decided to replace "e" with "a". Sure we would know what you meant, but it will still be spelt incorrectly.

There was one web site that had the cheek to exclude it completely;

"The Russian letter e is sometimes pronounced YO when it is the stressed syllable in a word. Strictly speaking, in such cases the letter should have two dots over it. However, Russians are supposed to know when to say 'yo' and so the two dots are omitted, except in rare cases. So it is not really thought of as the 33rd letter in the alphabet."

In actual fact it is the 7th letter of the Russian alphabet from what I can find.

The best description of it I can find is in the Wikipedia entry looking at the Russian Alphabet:

"The ë, introduced by Karamzin in 1797, marks a /jo/ sound that has historically developed from /je/ under stress, a process that continues today. The letter ë is optional: it is formally correct consistently to write e for both /je/ and /jo/. None of the several attempts in the twentieth century to mandate the use of ë have stuck, and today it is conceded that computer input has further weakened it.

Arthur

The first time letter 'ë' was proposed to be used by princess Dashkova on the meeting of Academy of sciences in 1783. It was probably when she was looking at the label on the bottle of Moët & Chandon.


In the name of this champagne the dots over 'e' serve to prevent the reader from reading 'OE' as one sound Œ (it would be "ì¸" instead of the right "ìîý").

In English for example the word cooperation should be written as coöperation because a person who doesn't know this word may read it as
[ku]peration as in "cool". But there's no "ë" in English.

The rule says that it must be used in cases of variants of reading, such as BCE and BCË; in dictionaries; for correct reading of rare geographical names and surnames; in the books for school children in Russia "ë" is always written for them to learn how to pronounce the words. But in everyday life people usually omit the letter because it makes difficulties in reading. It looks bad but sounds nice.

from the site of Artemiy Lebedev

As for me I try to use the letter in writing as more often as possible (because I'm a philologist) but it can be really annoying sometimes.

__________________
phedotov at gmail.com

Dmitri L

The reason why many Russians (not me) ignore the ¨ letter and replace it with E is its origin. You probably know that Russian language is inflective, i.e., nouns and adjectives have different cases, verbs have different personal forms etc. The sound ¨ is pronounced only when this syllable is under emphasis. When this syllable is not emphasized, the sound turns into E.

Examples (emphasized syllables are capitalized):

âåñíA (spring) - â¨ñíû (springs)
¨æ (hedgehog) - åæÈ (hedgehogs)
çåëåíÅòü (to be green) - çåë¨íûé (green) etc.

It's just like Americans mean different sounds under the same letters (compare gOne and gO) for the simple reason that MANY YEARS AGO those sounds were pronounced similarly. The same is in Russian: the sound ¨ was not "canonized" until the beginning of XIX century; before that time, literate people were obliged to pronounce E instead of ¨ in all cases (see e.g. Russian verses of XVIII and XIX centuries).

ProfessorXX

Dimitry is absolutely lovely person! To all of you, who trying to learn Russian. The letter ¨ doesn’t exist any more in written Russian after 1972 Academy Language revision. But the same time it’s not prohibited for usage. Just disregard it and use only E in your Russian writing.
The only difference it makes for foreigners – it helps to pronounce correctly a word if you reading loudly in public. (If you don’t pronounce it correctly, when reading by yourself – who cares!)
For example in modern Russian you see the word ÒÅÏËÛÉ (warm). The way you would pronounce it t y E p l i y. And only native speakers know, that you have to say t y O p l I y. So the letter E pronounce like Y-E-E-E and letter ¨ pronounce like Y-O-O-O
That’s it!!!! No complications and no deep meaning. The letter was created for the sake of correct reflection of the pronunciation. Russians don’t write any more ¨ëêà, they write Åëêà.
Just say it write – like when you see Bush don’t say Bosh.
Dmitry, you probably remember, that the letter ¨ always in any words MUST be emphasized. Anyway – you are lovely and the best on this forum.

Dmitri L

Though, it does. The Academy just allowed to ignore the diacritics, but did not expel the letter from the alphabet. And still, usage of this letter is in full discretion of those who write and/or publish.
Again, the same remark.