--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fortuna11111" <fortuna11111@...>
wrote:
> I know about this. Yet was what you call Russian orthography not
> under the influence of OCS? Or do you have other, independent
> written sources confirming the existence of those Yers in the
actual
> language of Russians? Did Russians have a written language at all,
> before OSC?
Old Russian texts we have at our disposal are of course written
mainly with the Cyrillic, but that doesn't mean they are all written
in OCS -- otherwise we coudn't even speak of Old Russian at all, only
of the Old Russian version of OSC texts. For instance, the language
of the birch bark inscriptions doesn't show any OSC influence
whatsoever -- neither orthographical nor lexical or morphological.
The yers (including word-final ones), BTW, are often rendered with
the graphemes <o> (for etymological *U) and <e> (*I) in the birch
bark inscriptions. That's not what one would call an OSC
orthographical influence, is it? The East Slavic loans in Baltic and
Baltic Finnish prove the yers were still alive and kicking at the
time of borrowing (cf., eg., Lith. <kùbilas> 'vat, tub' < ORuss
<kUbIlU> 'id.' which demonstrates the existence of medial yers and
Finnish <käämi> 'spindle, bobbin' < ORuss (Krivichian) <ke^vI> 'id.'
demonstrates the existence of a word-final yer).
Sergei