russian language

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The sixth century AD saw the migration of the Slav people from old Poland. The Slavs expanded westwards to the river Elbe and southwards to the Adriatic sea where they gradually occupied much of the Balkans. By the tenth century, three Slavonic language groups had emerged: Western, Southern and Eastern. Eastern Slavonic gave rise to the modern languages known as Ukranian, Belorussian and Russian. The Slavonic languages retained many features in common especially in grammatical structure, therefore the separate groups were able to use one common written language. This language was known as Old Slavonic or Old Church Slavonic (the language was used in its written form only). In the ninth century, two missionaries - Constantine (who on his deathbed took the monastic name Cyril) and Methodius - were required to write down the scriptures in Old Church Slavonic and to preach Christianity to the people of Moravia. Before they set out for Moravia, Constantine invented a Slavonic, now known as the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet is closely based on the Greek alphabet, with about a dozen additional letters invented to represent Slavic sounds not found in Greek.

Transliteration of Cyrillic letters into our Latin letters is difficult because there is no international agreement among experts on a single unified system of converting from Cyrillic into Latin letters. Indeed, each language has one or more methods of converting Russian into English or German or French, based on their own pronunciation of letters. In addition there is an official Russian transliteration from Cyrillic.

The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: 21 consonants, 10 vowels, and two letters without sound - soft sign and hard sign.  Look at the table above and see how you would pronounce Lenin.

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