Thread by @gro_tsen

Looking at Ukrainian words from the perspective of someone who knows just a little bit of Russian gives the superficial impression that:
⁃ Russian ‘и’ and ‘ы’ match to Ukrainian ‘і’ and ‘и’,
⁃ Russian ‘е’ and ‘э’ match to Ukrainian ‘є’ and ‘е’.
But It's Complicated™. •1/25

Here's what I THINK I understood. First, Slavic vowels historically came into two flavors: normal and “iotated”, pronounced with a /j/ before them (disclaimer: this is probably a huge oversimplification). In Old Slavonic, they are (sometimes) written with a iota-ligature. •2/25

The iotated vowels, but also some front vowels that were not iotated (‘i’, ‘ь’, ‘e’, ‘ѣ’, ‘ѧ’) caused palatalization (“softening”) of the previous consonant in East Slavic languages, inc. Russian and Ukrainian (exc. ‘e’?). But some vowels also changed, and others dropped. •3/25

E.g., the ‘ѧ’ vowel (“little yus”, historically a nasal, maybe like Polish ‘ę’) became /a/, but it is still distinguishable from ‘а’ because of the palatalization it caused. However, ‘ѧ’, ‘ѩ’ and ‘ꙗ’ would have become indistinguishable by then: they became modern ‘я’. •4/25

Similarly, the yer vowels ‘ь’ and ‘ъ’ dropped in many places — see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havl%C3%A… — but since the latter caused palatalization, it was still felt on the preceding consonant. This is the basis for modern Russian orthography: … •5/25

… the vowel signs not only mark the vowels, but they also indicate whether the previous consonant is “soft”, i.e., palatalized (provided it is palatalizable); the sign ‘ь’ marks palatalization in the absence of vowel, or /j/ between soft consonant and vowel, … •6/25

… and ‘ъ’ marks hard consonants in the absence of a vowel (mostly removed post 1917) or before a iotified vowel. OK, but what about ‘і’, ‘и’ and ‘ы’, then? Well, pre-1917 Russian orthography had all three, the first two pronounced /i/, the third, /ɨ/. •7/25

The letters ‘і’ and ‘и’ are copied from Greek ‘Ι’ (iota) and ‘Η’ (eta), which had merged in pronunciation at the time the Cyrillic alphabet was created. In Old Slavonic, IIUC, they represent the same sound, are maybe even interchangeable. •8/25

(They even imported Greek upsilon as ‘ѵ’, also with the same pronunciation, but this was basically used only for Greek words.) In pre-1917 Russian orthography, ‘і’ was used (roughly) before vowels and in the word “міръ”, “world” to distinguish from “миръ”, “peace”. •9/25

This is a somewhat artificial orthographic distinction: my Old Slavonic grammar writes “миръ” for both words. (Also, cue the urban legend that Tolstoj's ‘Война и Миръ’, ‘War and Peace’, was really ‘Война и Міръ’.) Nowadays, both are “мир” in Russian AND Ukrainian. •10/25

Russian ‘ы’, /ɨ/, arose from a ‘ъі’ or ‘ъи’ digraph (in Unicode: ‘ꙑ’). It's unclear to me whether it was ever a diphthong or just an orthographic convention. The writing was simplified to ‘ы’, explaining the paradox that this “hard” vowel starts with a “soft” sign. •11/25

Now Ukrainian merged the Slavic vowels ‘i’ and ‘y’ (Russian ‘и’ and ‘ы’), into one, pronounced /ɪ/. So Ukrainian indeed has ‘и’ in many places where Russian has ‘ы’, e.g., “ти” (2d pers sg pronoun) for Russian “ты”. Orthographically, IIUC, it does NOT show palatalization. •12/25

But as I pointed out earlier, Russian “мир” (both meanings) is also Ukrainian “мир”, Russian “один” (“one”) is also Ukrainian “один”. So whence to the Ukrainian ‘і’ come from, then? Well, it can be of various sorts. •13/25

A good part of Ukrainian ‘і’ come from the historical vowel ‘ѣ’ (formerly something like /æ/), which still existed in pre-1917 Russian orthography (e.g., “бѣлый”, “white”) and became ‘е’ in modern Russian (accented as ‘е’, not ‘ё’). So Russian “белый” = Ukrainian “білий”. •14/25

Similarly, Russian “лѣсъ” then “лес” (forest) = Ukrainian “ліс” But ‘і’ also appears word-initially: Russian “имя” = Ukrainian “ім'я” (apostrophe marks that ‘я’ is pronounced /ja/, not by palatalizing previous consonant: analogous to Russian ‘ъ’ mark here). •15/25

And in Ukrainian declension paradigms, where we have ‘и’ in the hard stem, it corresponds ‘і’ in the soft stem, just like in Russian hard ‘ы’ corresponds to soft ‘и’. Or it can also come from other vowels. So Russian “ночь, ночи” (“night, nights”) = Ukrainian “ніч, ночі”. •16/25

At any rate, orthographically, IIUC, Ukrainian ‘і’ marks palatalization of the preceding consonant (if this makes sense), like Russian ‘и’. And it is pronounced /i/. There is also a special sign, ‘ї’, for the /ji/ combination. •17/25

So, yeah, there's a certain parallel between Russian ‘и’ and ‘ы’ and Ukrainian ‘і’ and ‘и’, but it's not systematic or anything, many Russian ‘и’ are still ‘и’ in Ukrainian, and many Ukrainian ‘і’ are ‘е’ in Russian (historically ‘ѣ’). •18/25

Concerning ‘е’/‘э’ versus ‘є’/‘е’, I understand even less. Russian ‘е’ tends to reflect to Ukrainian ‘е’ even though the former is “soft” (palatalizing) and the latter is “hard”. E.g., Russian “вечер” (evening) = Ukrainian “вечір”. •19/25

I think Ukrainian more or less matches the historical Slavic vowels, with ‘е’ and its iotified counterpart ‘ѥ’, the latter having become ‘є’ in Ukrainian. So ‘е’ in the hard stem tends to correspond to ‘є’ in the soft stem. •20/25

In Russian, ‘э’ (almost?) only occurs at the beginning of words and foreign loanwords or transcriptions. The hard counterpart to ‘е’ in grammatical paradigms is ‘о’. I'm not clear as to why, nor whether this ‘о’/‘е’ parallel exists in any form in Ukrainian. •21/25

(And when Russian has ‘ё’, the only-accented palatalizing vowel /o/, then Ukrainian seems to write ‘йо’, or ‘ьо’ after consonant, e.g., Ukrainian “ньому” (3rd pers. sg pronoun, locative) = Russian “нём”.) •22/25

Anyway, that's what I think I managed to figure out without having access to any really reliable source (and without knowing any Ukrainian or more than the rudiments of Russian). Because of that, there are probably many errors or at least oversimplifications: … •23/25

… in the first place, while Russian had its last major orthographical reform in 1917, Ukrainian had a number of them, in 1928, 1933, 1999, 2019, I'm not sure I understood correctly, and understanding their differences is way beyond me. •24/25

So basically this whole thread is more of a plea for someone more knowledgeable than I am to intervene and explain all of this more correctly — but if possible not more complicatedly 😅 — than I did! •25/25