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One of the most complex and multifaceted in the world. It speaks to a huge number of people in almost all corners of our planet. It is the sixth in the number of speakers of it and the eighth in the number of its speakers. How much do we know about our native language? I propose to get acquainted with 20 curious facts about him.

Fact 1

In Russian, almost all words with the first letter "A" are borrowed. Words on the "A" that have arisen in our country are very few in modern usage - "AZBUKA", "AZ" and "ABOS".

Fact 2

"X" in the Old Russian alphabet was called "XEP". That's where the FUCK derivative came from. This meant crossing something with a cross. But over time, it acquired the usual meaning for us, such as "LOSE" or "CORRUPT".

Fact 3

In the Russian language there are words with three "E" in a row. There are only two of them - exotic "Snake Eater" and "LONG-NECKED".

Fact 4

In Russia, up to the 19th century, all obscene words were called absurd verbs. "Whisper" meant beauty and grace, and "absurd" meant the opposite of whining, that is, its antonym.

Fact 5

The longest frequently used word in our language has 14 letters. By the way, it is both a union and at the same time. This is "APPROPRIATE".

Fact 6

Englishmen studying Russian have their own secret for memorizing the sentence “I LOVE YOU”. They use the phrase "YELLOW BLUE BASS", which is similar in their language, literally translates as "yellow-blue bus".

Fact 7

Our alphabet is strange enough. In it, some letters are similar to Latin. Others, though written in the same way, sound completely different. There are also two letters that cannot be pronounced at all, they do not have their own sounds - these are hard and soft signs.

Fact 8

In our language, there are words that have the first letter "Y". Many people remember only "YOD", "YOGA", "YOSHKAR-OLA". And there are already 74 of them.

Fact 9

There are words and the letter "Y". True, they are used only as the names of cities and rivers located in Russia: YLYMAKH, YNAKHSYT, YTYK-KEEL.

Fact 10

Surprisingly, we have one word where "O" is used seven times. This is "DEFENSE".

Fact 11

At the moment 260 million people speak Russian. On the Internet, it is the second most popular, second only to English.

Fact 12

Since 2009, the Ministry of Education has legalized the admissibility of the use of the word "COFFEE" in both masculine and neuter gender.

Fact 13

The word "BABA" has now become slang. But before it was considered an honor to be. Moreover, this title had to be earned. Baba is a woman who has given birth to a son (namely a son, not a daughter).

Fact 14

The word "HULIGAN" is not at all of Russian origin. It arose on behalf of the English Haligan family, whose members were distinguished by their violent disposition.

Fact 15

The letter "E" is the youngest in the alphabet. It appeared only in 1873.

Fact 16

It was in Russian that the first words were spoken in space. By whom? Of course, Yuri Gagarin.

Fact 17

In 1993, the longest word in our native language was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records - this is "X-RAY ELECTROCARDIOGRAPHIC". It has 33 letters.

Fact 18

The human hand is not only an important part of the body. They love to “use” it in many stable expressions in Russian: “Carry on hands”, “Hands itch”, “Hand in hand”.

Fact 19

In the Old Church Slavonic language "I" was the very first letter of the alphabet.

Fact 20

In the 18th century, the exclamation mark was called the point of surprise.

And on this we will put a fat point of surprise. Develop, learn (including thanks) and love your native language!

If you know any more interesting facts, do not be greedy, share them with others in the comments to this article.

There are currently 65 different alphabets in use around the world. The richest of them is Khmer, there are 72 letters in it, and the most economical is the alphabet of one of the languages ​​of Papua New Guinea, which is enough for 11 letters.

The alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians ( already in the 15th century BC. NS. the Phoenicians had an alphabet consisting of 22 letters) , and the Greeks invented to introduce vowels into it. The last major improvement in the alphabet was developed by Roman scribes in the 4th century AD: they separated uppercase and lowercase letters.

The oldest letter is "O". It was present in the Phoenician alphabet about 3300 years ago and has not changed at all since then.

The most common vowel sound in the world's languages ​​is "A". There is no language that does not have such a sound. It is even in Abkhaz, where there are only two vowels - "a" and "e", and in Ubykh, where "a" is the only vowel.

I am afraid that you will not find truly Russian words that end with the sound "E": mufflers and pince-nez are French words.

In Russian, the letter "Y" is never at the beginning of a word. But the Turks simply adore her. Our word for "closet" in Turkey is "ishkaf". Iraq is called "Yrak" in Turkey.

Also, oddly enough, the Russian language almost does not tolerate words beginning with the sound and the letter "a". Take the "Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language": there are quite a few words with "a", but almost every one indicates that this word came to us (often together with the subject that it denotes) from another language.

We see the same thing, however, in other languages. So, for example, in the French language there are almost no proper words that would begin with the letters "x, y, z".

Linguists will tell you that in the Russian language there was a vowel sound, a cross between "e" and "and", to designate it in the letter was the letter "Yat". However, in the 19th century, no Russian could, with all desire, notice such a subtle difference by ear, and the spelling turned into a nightmare for schoolchildren. In the end, the "yat" was abolished.

Open the volume of Pushkin: in most of his poems you will not find the letter "F", in "The Tale of the Priest and His Worker Balda" you will not find a single letter "f", no matter how many you search, and among the 30,000 letters of "Poltava" only three "f." , "Fufaney" and "figli-migli".

The letter "solid sign", or as it used to be called "er", now behaves quietly and at ease. But until recently, schoolchildren who were learning to read and write suffered terrible misfortunes from this letter. Until 1917, in the phrase "Then they wrote about a solid sign with anger and indignation .." it would be necessary to put 4 "era". In the 1897 edition of War and Peace, there are 54-55 solid characters per page. That's 70+ useless pages! If you count all the books, it turns out that in tsarist Russia about eight and a half million pages were printed annually, from top to bottom covered only with solid characters.

Why are the letters in the alphabet in this order?

I often find the answer to this question on the Internet in the following form: "This is an inexplicable fact." But I still found some explanations that I want to convey to you. And you already tell me if you have heard a different version.

Everything is simple with the Russian alphabet. Slavic writing is only a little over a thousand years old, and its history is known. In the second half of the 9th century, the brothers Cyril and Methodius decided to bring Christianity to the Slavic world, and since Christianity is the religion of the book, Cyril invented an alphabet for the Slavs, a verb.

Cyril invented the original designs (although based on the Greek minuscule widespread at that time), but kept the order in general terms. Maybe so that letters are still convenient to denote numbers. Maybe because he did not know another order. Perhaps because the alphabetical order of the language of the Bible is sacred - the Bible says: “I am the alpha and omega,” that is, the beginning and the end.

The only thing was to give some place to the letters that denoted sounds that were absent in Greek: B, F, C, CH, W, etc. And they were placed either next to the letters denoting the most similar sounds (B - next to C, F - next to Z), or at the end of the alphabet. When the Cyrillic alphabet, more similar to the Greek letters, was used instead of the Glagolitic alphabet, the alphabetical order was generally preserved, although some rare letters in different lists occupy different places, and some are found only in a part of the lists.

The Greek alphabet took its order of letters from the Semitic script. There is a legend about the Phoenician Cadmus, who taught the Greeks to write. Like the Slavs, the Greeks needed additional letters, so at the end of the Greek alphabet we see phi (Φ), chi (Χ), psi (Ψ) and omega (Ω), which were absent from the Phoenicians. By the way, in the early lists these letters are not, the alphabet ends either with an ipslon (Y), or generally with tau (T).

Ultimately, the Latin alphabet also goes back to the same source, which is why the order of the letters in it differs so little from the Russian we are used to. The most, perhaps, noticeable is that at the place of G before the letter D (D) we see C (read as "k"). But if you look at the Latin letter G, you can see that it is derived from C (and was produced quite late - that is why the name Guy was shortened by the letter C for a long time - have you ever heard of Julius Caesar's "Kai"?).

But where the order of the letters in the Semitic letter came from is not exactly known. The signs themselves, most likely, did not arise without the influence of Egyptian writing, but the Semites invented the order themselves. Moreover, even before the appearance of the Semitic script proper: it is first found in Ugaritic writing, and it is cuneiform.

If the Europeans simply copied the order of the letters (perhaps in order to preserve, at least mainly, behind the letters, their numerical meanings), then the ancient Indians, who had a good linguistic tradition, having received the Semitic letter at their disposal, arranged the letters in accordance with the pronunciation: first vowels, then consonants, and within these groups the order is also not accidental. And the Indians have come up with separate numbers for themselves. Then, through the Arabs, these figures reached Europe, and we know them under the name of "Arab" - but that's another story.

Here's another opinion: The fact is that the current alphabet system comes from the old Russian alphabet. And to memorize it, the method of mental images was used. It's easier to memorize meaningful text than to cram a set of symbols. So this order appeared, but no other. Of course, it changed over time, some letters left, some were added, but the skeleton, so to speak, remained.

“Az buki wede. The verb is good natural. Live green, earth, and like people, think of our chambers. Rtsy word is firm - uk fart her. Tsy, worm, shta'ra yus yati. "

One of the options for translating this text is as follows:
“I know the letters: the letter is an asset. Work hard, earthlings, as befits reasonable people - comprehend the universe!
Carry the word with conviction: knowledge is a gift from God! Dare, penetrate in order to comprehend the light of existence! "

Or here's something else interesting:

Squared 7 by 7

On the first line:

I know God, I say good, so I exist.

On the second line:

Life is plentiful on Earth when the universal truth is from God in the community.

On the third line:

For all thinking people, only He (God) speaks peace.

On the fourth line:

The word, confirmed from above, calls to confidently adhere to the foundations of the wisdom of good in order to complete the path, to come into harmony for a new beginning.

On the fifth line:

Protecting our earth's borders and growing ensures God's protection and our unity.

On the sixth line:

The harmonious development and growth potential of my family and me, as a part of it, depends on the Supreme source and the history of the family.

On the seventh line:

The meaning of life is in striving to perfect the spirit and soul until it matures completely into a perfect personality in eternity.

Vertical 1 column:

My life is like a thought clothed in sound, striving for harmony, the smallest particle of intelligence in the universe.

2 column:

God creates a solid border around people and directs them to self-improvement.

3 column:

Knowing the Earth and thinking about it call for peace in the spirit of our kind (people).

4 column:

Speaking the truth is our tradition, our protection, a part of our soul. (What is the strength of the brother? - In the Truth!)

5 column:

The good of the Universe is that God the Creator confidently and firmly creates the growth of everything, for the full ripening of the seed.

6 column:

The essence of human society's existence is in peace, tranquility, balance, harmony, unity from the Supreme Source to the perfect soul.

7 column:

The existing heavenly Source brings into our world both the beginning of everything and the growth of everything and the experience of people in time.

Diagonal from top to bottom and from left to right:

I think a lot and the foundation of my creativity is always the supreme Source.

Where, for example, did the letter "Y" come from? Who crossed out the young letter "E" from all the books that came to hand? Where did the Belarusians get the "Ў"? And what happens if you read the full names of the Cyrillic letters in a row?

The answers to these questions can surprise even the most boring person. And most importantly: why do we even know anything about letters? Write to yourself - and history is a matter for specialists.

Photo: udf. b y

Discoverers of letters

But if you realize that the alphabet, this foundation of any culture (but what is there culture, the foundation of everything that surrounds us, because without the alphabet there is no work, no study, no simple intimate communication, they just took - and came up with smart people), if To realize this - then somehow you begin to look at the role of the individual in history and at your own role in a different way.

Why is it possible for Karamzin or Dubovka to invent whole letters for the whole people, but we are afraid to offer the management a tiny innovation?

For example, Cyril and Methodius from distant Soloniks took - and came to Russia, to a huge incomprehensible country without an alphabet.

This is what a titanic work: to learn a language, to understand how sounds are combined, isolated and articulated in it, to come up with letters for these sounds, and so that it is convenient to write with them and it is convenient to read them!

Their glagolitic alphabet (did you know that Cyril invented the verbolitic, not the Cyrillic alphabet? Cyrillic is already his students) is a unique alphabet: it is completely artificially invented, made up of three Christian symbols: a cross, a circle and a triangle.

Very nice, but awkward to use alphabet.

Photo: newtheory.ru

The alphabet was beautiful, but inconvenient: when writing, the letters merged, got confused, and in general looked like a heap of circles and crosses.

And then the Cyrillic alphabet appeared - an easy, quick letter based on the Greek alphabet. This one came out with both beauty and convenience!

Photo: samlib.ru

And then the creators of the alphabet made a little joke. Or maybe they didn't play a joke, but they encrypted the message for us. Try to read as a whole, like a text, the ancient names of Cyrillic letters:

“Az buki vede. The verb is good natural. Live green, earth, and, like people, think of our chambers. Rtsy the word is firm - uk fart her. Tsy, worm, shta'ra yus yati. "

The translation of the text into modern language is impressive:

“I know the letters. A letter is an asset. Work hard, earthlings, as befits reasonable people - comprehend the universe! Carry the word with conviction: knowledge is a gift from God! Dare, penetrate in order to comprehend the light of existence! "

The process did not stop with Cyril and his students: many wonderful people, among other things, invented letters. The historian Karamzin, for example, invented the letter "E", our Vladimir Dubovka - special letters for the Belarusian affricates "J" and "DZ", and with our cult "Ў" a detective story came out.

Forbid language, but come up with a letter

There was such a scientist - Peter Alekseevich Bessonov. If you look strictly - the evil genius of our history. A major official, a Slavophile, even a Pan-Slavist. A man who does not recognize any other Slavs, dismissing the Russians, he was based not on naked emotions - on facts.

Before denying the right of Belarusians to self-determination, he studied the Belarusians in the most thorough way and even described in some places.

He had plenty of material for observation: Bessonov replaced dozens of various responsible posts in the Vilnius education, was a member of the team of Count Muravyov, which was closely involved in Russian schools in the North-West Territory, while collecting Belarusian folklore (under the Russian label) and casually invented the letter "Ў" to denote a specific sound characteristic of Belarusian mov.

Pyotr Alekseevich Bessonov. Photo: be.wikipedia.org

Bessonov was a strange man: he invented the letter, but denied the differences between Belarusians and Russians. However, he was generally an inconsistent person: his scientific works on Russian folklore, which, by virtue of the highest positions of the author, were overflowing with the then science, are examples of the explosive imagination of a researcher.

He invented non-existent songs and fairy tales, talked about as if accomplished expeditions, drew sudden conclusions from events that had never happened - in a word, no one even argued with him, because how to argue with something that does not exist?

Chasing the alphabet

It's never too late to come up with a letter. Grateful people who need this letter will gladly pick up the innovation.

The letter "E" in the alphabet of Belarusians appeared in the 15th century, "Y" - at the end of the 16th century (we needed it more than the others, since our language strives for melodiousness and proportionate alternation of vowels and consonants), and got into the Russian alphabet in 1735 year. The letter "E" was invented by the Russians at the end of the 18th century and picked up by the Belarusians a hundred years later, and Russian users were not happy with the letter all at once.

Academician Shishkov, for example, personally blotted out dots from all the books that came to the home library, and until now in Russian spelling "E" instead of "E" is not considered a mistake, but obedient and orderly Belarusians decided to write E - and not resist, and now our schoolchildren, if they do not put the dots, will receive a mark one point lower.

They even erected a monument to this heroic letter in Ulyanovsk.

Photo: strana.ru

And some letters from the alphabets drop out at sharp turns of history. So, Peter the Great was the first to "clean up" the Cyrillic alphabet and threw out the letters "psi", "xi" and "omega" from there. I wanted to remove more ichitsa and ferth, but for some reason the clergy needed them, and under threats of heavenly punishment, Peter retreated.

However, Izhitsa and Firth did not last long in the alphabet anyway, they wrote it less and less, and in 1918 they stopped altogether due to the massive expulsion of religious texts from mass reading.

It is believed that it was abolished by the Bolsheviks along with yat and fita, but in the famous reform of 1918, the reformers have already forgotten about Izhitsa, and so it died by itself.

Someone can in no way arrange their only alphabet, and the Belarusians cannot be determined in any way which of the possible ones to finally choose: we are the happy owners of the Cyrillic and Krapivinski spelling, the Cyrillic alphabet in Bronislav Tarashkevich's version - and the Belarusian Latin alphabet, which, by the way, is serious differs from Polish or Czech Latin.

We see this half-forgotten, but, they say, the alphabet most understandable to our language every day before our eyes: it is in the Belarusian Latin script that all the inscriptions in the renovated Minsk metro and signs in the historical center are made.

Belarusian Latins are perceived by Minskers as their own.

Photo: vremya4e.com

So what, you ask? Why do we need to know the history of letters?

Yes, if only because the history of letters is always the history of people, and you can inscribe your name in history in the most literal sense with the help of a letter.

It is still somehow more humane than inventing machine guns, dynamites or nuclear bombs.

VELVET: Anna Sevyarynets

The alphabet is the key to knowledge. Studying the alphabet, we take the first and very step towards a systematic acquaintance with science and culture, we get an irreplaceable tool for gaining new knowledge.

It is believed that the first alphabetic alphabet appeared in the 13th century BC. e., when the Phoenicians made a decisive transition from signs denoting words to signs denoting sounds. Almost all existing alphabets are descendants of the Phoenician or Canaanite script. In the Phoenician alphabet, letters denoted only consonants and there were enough of them. However, in modern Russian too, the overwhelming majority of texts will remain understandable if they are written only in consonant letters.

The history of the Russian alphabet can be traced quite clearly. It comes from the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet, which Cyril and Methodius gradually adapted, first to the Old Church Slavonic language, and then to Old Russian. The Russian alphabet developed as a living organism - new letters appeared, some rarely used or completely unnecessary ones disappeared. The current version of the Russian alphabet can be dated back to 1942. Then the use of the letter "ё" became mandatory, respectively, there were 33 letters in the alphabet.

Here are some fun facts about the Russian alphabet:

1. The Cyrillic alphabet had 49 letters. Gradually, their number decreased to 32, and then again grew slightly due to "ё".

2. Most often the letter "o" is used in the Russian language. The rarest letter in Russian writing is a hard sign.

3. The letter "o" is 2,000 years older than the entire alphabet. In the word "defense capability" it is used 8 times.

4. The letter "y" occupies a rather high 23rd place out of 33 in terms of frequency of use, but only 74 words start with it.

5. In the Russian language there are no words beginning with soft and hard signs and "s".

6. The letter "f" occurs exclusively in words of foreign origin.

7. Peter I, reforming the spelling, removed the letters "xi", "omega" and "psi" from the alphabet. The emperor wanted to remove four more letters and all superscripts, but the opposition of the priests was so strong that even the frantic Peter was forced to retreat. Lomonosov later called the reform of Peter I the dressing up of letters from winter fur coats into summer clothes.

8. The letter "ё" was invented back in 1783, but it was finally included in the alphabet only after a century and a half. The surname of the hero "Anna Karenina" was "Levin". In Levin it was renamed by the printing workers. However, later Andrei Bely and Maria Tsvetaeva did not use this letter in principle. In 1956, it was made optional again. On the Russian Internet, heated debates about "yo" did not subside until 2010.

9. A solid sign and now is not the easiest letter to use, and before the reform of 1918, its predecessor, called "er", was the cornerstone of literacy. It had to be placed according to special rules at the end of words (but not all) ending in a consonant. There were more than 50 "ers" on almost any book page. All the "eras" copied from "War and Peace" would occupy 70 pages.

10. During the reform of 1918, the last two letters were removed from the alphabet, and the last became "I". In certain circles, the reform was interpreted as follows: "The Bolsheviks put human individuality in the last place."

11. The deletion of the letter “myrrh” from the alphabet was also interpreted in a corresponding way - the new government refuses to anoint the Orthodox.

12. The Cyrillic alphabet was based on the Greek alphabet, so the order of the letters is very similar in the Russian and Greek alphabets. With the letters denoting sounds that are not in Greek, Cyril and Methodius acted simply and logically - they placed them in front of the most similar Greek ("b" before "c", "g" before "z"), or put them at the end of the list ...

13. With the exception of the counted units, all words starting with "a" are borrowed. For example, "alphabet". But the word "alphabet" is natively Russian.

14. The well-known writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn already in the 1970s proposed to return "yat" and "er" to the Russian alphabet.

15. The letter "e" appeared in the alphabet after borrowing foreign words with a corresponding sound. Before that, there was no need for it. Even now, in many words, especially at the end, it is replaced by "e", for example, "pince-nez".