Karelian alphabet
Encyclopedia
The Karelian language
is spoken in Russia
, mostly in the Karelian Republic
and in a small region just north of Tver
, though most residents there were expelled in 1939. Karelian has seen numerous proposed and adopted alphabets over the centuries, both Latin-based and Cyrillic. In 2007, the current standardized Karelian alphabet was introduced and is used to write all varieties of Karelian, with the exception of Tver Karelian.
The oldest known document in Karelian, or in any Finnic language, is the Birch bark letter no. 292
, found in 1957 and believed to be either an invocation against lighting, or an oath. Until the 19th century it is believed that Karelian was only written down by individuals; it was not taught in schools.
, the first known one was A Translation of some Prayers and a Shortened Catechism into North Karelian and Olonets (Aunus) dialects in 1804. Karelian literature in 19th century Russia remained limited to a few primers, songbooks and leaflets.
The letters used to transcribe Karelian sounds varied. For example, in the gospel of St. Matthew (Герранъ мія̈нъ. Шондю-руохтынанъ святой іôванг̧ели матвѣйста, Карьяланъ кїӗлѣлля) in South Karelian Tver dialect, in 1820, they used vowels with breves, circumflexes, and г with a cedille:
In the Карельско-Русскій Букварь (Karelian-Russian Dictionary), 1887:
Another example: in the Русско-Корельскій Словарь (Russian-Karelian Dictionary), 1908,
Tver State University Finno-Ugrist Lyudmila Georgievna Gromova points out in one great difficulty in these early Karelian Cyrillic alphabets, was the inconsistency in rendering the sounds a, ä, ja, jä, ö, jö, y, and jy. For example, in the 1820 translation of Matthew, "я" might represent the sound ä, ja, or jä.
. In the end they chose Finnish over Karelian.
Nonetheless, some publishing continued in Cyrillic. The research into Karelian folklore of Maria Mikhailovskaya Bezhetsky, a teacher from the Vozdvizhenskaya school district, was published in 1925. In August–December 1929, the newspaper Tverskaya Derevnya (Tver Village), printed in Cyrillic, became the first newspaper ever published in the Karelian language.
Note the additional letters borrowed from Cyrillic: з (/dž/) and ь, as well as the unusual Latin ƶ and ȷ (j without dot).
However, in the end a proposal was adopted with fewer non-standard Cyrillic letters: it included the entire Russian alphabet plus the letters Ӓ
, Ӧ
, and Ӱ
.
On September 8, 1937, at the proposal of its chairman, M.I. Kalinin, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee discussed the Cyrillization of the Karelian language. The final orthography was approved by the Karelian Regional Committee on February 10, 1938 and published in the newspaper "Karel'skaya Pravda". On February 14, the RSFSR People's Commissariat issued decree no. 214, introducing the single Karelian language in the Cyrillic alphabet.
From 1937-39 the Soviet government used the new Karelian standard language written in Cyrillic in both the Karelian SSR and Tver Region.
During this period Karjalan Sanomat
was written in Karelian using Cyrillic, rather than in Finnish.
The effort was dropped in 1940 and Finnish (written as always in the Latin alphabet) once again became an official language of the Karelian SSR, while in the Tver region most Karelians were expelled in 1939 and Karelian was banned there. The reason for abandoning Cyrillic, and the Karelian language itself, as the national language of the republic may have two explanations:
. It was replaced by the unified Karelian alphabet in 2007. The alphabet consisted of twenty-nine characters, and it was very similar to the modern alphabet:
In the Olonets Karelian alphabet, the letter Ǯ was used instead of the digraph
Dž to mark the voiced affricate. For example, the word mandžoi (strawberry) was written manǯoi. For the computers used in those days, the letter ǯ was problematic, and in many cases it had to be inserted manually afterwards. The letter Ü represented the same vowel sound as the letter Y used in the modern alphabet.
except Tver Karelian. It consists of a total of twenty-eight characters: twenty-two are from the basic modern Latin alphabet
, five are derived from basic Latin letters by the addition of diacritical marks, and the final character is the apostrophe, which signifies palatalization
of the preceding sound. The entire range of sounds of native Karelian words is intended to be represented by this set of characters.
This unified alphabet was approved in 2007 as a replacement for the separate Olonets Karelian and Karelian Proper alphabets. The letters Ä and Ö are vowels which, unlike the German umlauts, are considered to be distinct and are alphabetized separately from the corresponding vowels without the umlauts. The postalveolar consonants Č, Š and Ž can be replaced by the digraphs Ch, Sh and Zh when writing the caron
is impossible or inconvenient—for example ruočči (Swedish) may be written as ruochchi.
Karelian language
Karelian language is a Finnic language spoken mainly in the Russian Republic of Karelia. Linguistically Karelian is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland and some Finnish linguists even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish...
is spoken in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, mostly in the Karelian Republic
Republic of Karelia
The Republic of Karelia is a federal subject of Russia .-Geography:The republic is located in the northwestern part of Russia, taking intervening position between the basins of White and Baltic seas...
and in a small region just north of Tver
Tver
Tver is a city and the administrative center of Tver Oblast, Russia. Population: 403,726 ; 408,903 ;...
, though most residents there were expelled in 1939. Karelian has seen numerous proposed and adopted alphabets over the centuries, both Latin-based and Cyrillic. In 2007, the current standardized Karelian alphabet was introduced and is used to write all varieties of Karelian, with the exception of Tver Karelian.
Middle Ages
Birch bark letter no. 292
The Birch bark letter given the document number 292 is the oldest known document in any Finnic language. The document is dated to the beginning of the 13th century...
, found in 1957 and believed to be either an invocation against lighting, or an oath. Until the 19th century it is believed that Karelian was only written down by individuals; it was not taught in schools.
19th and early 20th century
In the 19th century a few books were published in Karelian using the Cyrillic alphabetCyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
, the first known one was A Translation of some Prayers and a Shortened Catechism into North Karelian and Olonets (Aunus) dialects in 1804. Karelian literature in 19th century Russia remained limited to a few primers, songbooks and leaflets.
The letters used to transcribe Karelian sounds varied. For example, in the gospel of St. Matthew (Герранъ мія̈нъ. Шондю-руохтынанъ святой іôванг̧ели матвѣйста, Карьяланъ кїӗлѣлля) in South Karelian Tver dialect, in 1820, they used vowels with breves, circumflexes, and г with a cedille:
In the Карельско-Русскій Букварь (Karelian-Russian Dictionary), 1887:
- Г with a bar on top was used for the sound /g/ (Modern Karelian/Finnish "g")
- Г without a bar represented /h/ (Modern Karelian/Finnish "h")
- Е was used for /e/
- both І and И were used for Modern Karelian/Finnish "i"
- ІЙ was used for Modern Karelian/Finnish "ii"
- Ы was used for the sound /y/ (Modern Karelian/Finnish "y")
- Ю with umlaut was used for the sound /jy/ (Modern Karelian/Finnish "jy")
- ѢYatYat or Jat is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet. Its name in Old Church Slavonic is jěd’ or iad’ . In the common scientific Latin transliteration for old Slavic languages, the letter is represented by e with caron: .The yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel...
was used for Modern Karelian/Finnish ä - Ъ was used at the end of all words that did not end in a vowel or soft sign, as in the Russian languageRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
before the Revolution
Another example: in the Русско-Корельскій Словарь (Russian-Karelian Dictionary), 1908,
- Ā was used for modern Karelian/Finnish ä (instead of Ѣ)
- Г with a Greek-style rough breathing mark was used for /h/
- У with rough breathing mark was used for /y/
- ӮU with macron (Cyrillic)U with macron is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, derived from the Cyrillic letter U .U with macron is used in the alphabet of the Tajik language, where it represents the close-mid front rounded vowel,...
was used - Э was used for /e/ instead of Ѣ in the 1887 text
Tver State University Finno-Ugrist Lyudmila Georgievna Gromova points out in one great difficulty in these early Karelian Cyrillic alphabets, was the inconsistency in rendering the sounds a, ä, ja, jä, ö, jö, y, and jy. For example, in the 1820 translation of Matthew, "я" might represent the sound ä, ja, or jä.
Soviet period
In 1921, the first all-Karelian congress under the Soviet regime debated between Finnish and Karelian should be the official language (next to Russian of course) of the new "Karelian Labour Commune", which two years later would become the Karelian ASSRKarelian ASSR
The Karelian ASSR was an autonomous republic of the Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, with the capital in Petrozavodsk.The Karelian ASSR was formed as a part of the Russian SFSR by the Resolution of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of June 27, 1923 and by the Decree of...
. In the end they chose Finnish over Karelian.
Nonetheless, some publishing continued in Cyrillic. The research into Karelian folklore of Maria Mikhailovskaya Bezhetsky, a teacher from the Vozdvizhenskaya school district, was published in 1925. In August–December 1929, the newspaper Tverskaya Derevnya (Tver Village), printed in Cyrillic, became the first newspaper ever published in the Karelian language.
Latin alphabet for Tver Karelian (1930)
In 1930-31, a Karelian literary language using the Latin alphabet was standardized for the Tver Karelian community, south of the Karelian ASSR and north of Tver, with the following alphabet::Note the additional letters borrowed from Cyrillic: з (/dž/) and ь, as well as the unusual Latin ƶ and ȷ (j without dot).
Unified Cyrillic Karelian alphabet (1937-40)
In 1937 the government wished to replace the use of Finnish (in the Karelian ASSR) and Karelian written in Latin (in the Tver region), with a single standard Karelian language written in Cyrillic. Two proposals were sourced.- One proposal was published in October 1937 by the Karelian educational affairs people's commissariat, which included the following letters with umlauts: А, Е, О, У, Ю, Я
- Another proposal was published by Karjalaisen piirikunnan alphabetization project (Karjalaisen piirikunnan aakkosprojekti), and included the following letters with macronMacronA macron, from the Greek , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel . It was originally used to mark a long or heavy syllable in Greco-Roman metrics, but now marks a long vowel...
s (bars): А Е О У, and also included Ӡ (for the "dzh" sound) and І. Ē (Е with macron) replaced Russian Ё. Some of the equivalents to Latin letters were as follows:Cyrillic letter(s) Latin equivalent Ā ä Е e (not "je") Ō (O with macron) ö Ӯ U with macron (Cyrillic)U with macron is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, derived from the Cyrillic letter U .U with macron is used in the alphabet of the Tajik language, where it represents the close-mid front rounded vowel,...y Я ja ІĀ jä Ē (Е with macron) jo ІŌ (І + O with macron) jö Ю ju ІӮ jü Ӡ dž
However, in the end a proposal was adopted with fewer non-standard Cyrillic letters: it included the entire Russian alphabet plus the letters Ӓ
A with diaeresis (Cyrillic)
A with diaeresis is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet used in the Khanty, Kildin Sami, and Mari language languages. Also, this letter was once used in the Gagauz language .-Usage:...
, Ӧ
O with diaeresis (Cyrillic)
O with diaeresis is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. In all its forms it looks exactly like the Latin letter Ö .O with diaeresis is used in the alphabets of the Altay, Khakas, Komi, Kurdish, Mari and Udmurt languages....
, and Ӱ
U with diaeresis (Cyrillic)
U with diaeresis is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, derived from the Cyrillic letter U .U with diaeresis is used in the alphabets of the Altai, Khakass, Khanty and Mari languages, where it represents the close front rounded vowel , the pronunciation of the Latin letter U with umlaut in...
.
On September 8, 1937, at the proposal of its chairman, M.I. Kalinin, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee discussed the Cyrillization of the Karelian language. The final orthography was approved by the Karelian Regional Committee on February 10, 1938 and published in the newspaper "Karel'skaya Pravda". On February 14, the RSFSR People's Commissariat issued decree no. 214, introducing the single Karelian language in the Cyrillic alphabet.
From 1937-39 the Soviet government used the new Karelian standard language written in Cyrillic in both the Karelian SSR and Tver Region.
During this period Karjalan Sanomat
Karjalan Sanomat
Karjalan Sanomat is a Finnish language newspaper from the Republic of Karelia, published in Petrozavodsk.Previous names:* 1920-1923: Karjalan kommuuni * 1923-1937: Punainen Karjala...
was written in Karelian using Cyrillic, rather than in Finnish.
The effort was dropped in 1940 and Finnish (written as always in the Latin alphabet) once again became an official language of the Karelian SSR, while in the Tver region most Karelians were expelled in 1939 and Karelian was banned there. The reason for abandoning Cyrillic, and the Karelian language itself, as the national language of the republic may have two explanations:
- Difficulty of implementation:
- insufficient variety of literature available in Karelian
- difficulty of finding enough teachers qualified to teach in the language
- unfamiliarity with the new standardized language to speakers of the existing dialects which were very different from one another
- Political reasons: On March 31, 1940 the Karelian ASSR became a full-fledged SSR, the Karelo-Finnish SSR, expanded with territory won from Finland in the Winter War. Some later historians explained this as a "convenient means for facilitating the possible incorporation of additional Finnish territory" (or, possibly, the whole of Finland) into the USSR. Under this theory, Finnish (with far more speakers and a far more established literary tradition) would logically become the national language of the expanded republic, so it made no sense to continue with Karelian.
Olonets Karelian alphabet (1989-2007)
Olonets Karelian alphabet was approved in 1989 and it was used to write Olonets KarelianOlonets Karelian
Livvi-Karelian is a Finnic language of the Uralic family. spoken by Olonets Karelians , traditionally inhabiting the area between Ladoga and Onega lakes, northward of Svir River...
. It was replaced by the unified Karelian alphabet in 2007. The alphabet consisted of twenty-nine characters, and it was very similar to the modern alphabet:
- A B Č D Ǯ E F G H I J K L M N O P R S Š Z Ž T U V ÜÜÜ, or ü, is a character which can be either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter U with an umlaut or a diaeresis...
Ä Ö '
In the Olonets Karelian alphabet, the letter Ǯ was used instead of the digraph
Digraph
Digraph may refer to:* Digraph , a pair of characters used together to represent a single sound, such as "sh" in English* Typographical ligature, the joining of two letters as a single glyph, such as "æ"...
Dž to mark the voiced affricate. For example, the word mandžoi (strawberry) was written manǯoi. For the computers used in those days, the letter ǯ was problematic, and in many cases it had to be inserted manually afterwards. The letter Ü represented the same vowel sound as the letter Y used in the modern alphabet.
Current Karelian alphabet (2007-)
The modern unified Karelian alphabet is a used to write all variants of the Karelian languageKarelian language
Karelian language is a Finnic language spoken mainly in the Russian Republic of Karelia. Linguistically Karelian is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland and some Finnish linguists even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish...
except Tver Karelian. It consists of a total of twenty-eight characters: twenty-two are from the basic modern Latin alphabet
Basic modern Latin alphabet
The International Organization for Standardization basic Latin alphabet consists of the following 26 letters:By the 1960s it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed...
, five are derived from basic Latin letters by the addition of diacritical marks, and the final character is the apostrophe, which signifies palatalization
Palatalization
In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....
of the preceding sound. The entire range of sounds of native Karelian words is intended to be represented by this set of characters.
| Majuscule Forms (also called uppercase or capital letters) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A A A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :... |
B B B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:... |
Č C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets... |
D D D is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the... |
E E E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:... |
F F F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or . Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club... |
G G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,... |
H H H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.... |
I I I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound... |
J J Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic... |
K K K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA.... |
L L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet... |
M M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water... |
N N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet... |
O O O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a... |
P P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words... |
R R R is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R... |
S S S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent... |
Š Š The grapheme Š, š is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with , but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.For use in computer... |
Z Z Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal... |
Ž Ž The grapheme Ž is formed from Latin Z with the addition of caron . It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative, a sound similar to English g in mirage, or Portuguese and French j... |
T T T is the 20th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets... |
U U U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details.... |
V V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.... |
Y Y Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound... |
Ä Ä "Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :... |
Ö Ö "Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut... |
' Apostrophe The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets... |
| Minuscule Forms (also called lowercase or small letters) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| a | b | č | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | r | s | š | z | ž | t | u | v | y | ä | ö | ' |
This unified alphabet was approved in 2007 as a replacement for the separate Olonets Karelian and Karelian Proper alphabets. The letters Ä and Ö are vowels which, unlike the German umlauts, are considered to be distinct and are alphabetized separately from the corresponding vowels without the umlauts. The postalveolar consonants Č, Š and Ž can be replaced by the digraphs Ch, Sh and Zh when writing the caron
Caron
A caron or háček , also known as a wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finno-Lappic, and other languages.It looks...
is impossible or inconvenient—for example ruočči (Swedish) may be written as ruochchi.
Letter names
| Letter | Letter name |
|---|---|
| A A A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :... |
aa |
| B B B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:... |
bee |
| Č C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets... |
čee |
| D D D is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the... |
dee |
| E E E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:... |
ee |
| F F F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or . Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club... |
ef |
| G G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,... |
gee |
| H H H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.... |
hoo |
| I I I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound... |
ii |
| J J Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic... |
jii |
| K K K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA.... |
koo |
| L L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet... |
el |
| M M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water... |
em |
| N N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet... |
en |
| O O O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a... |
oo |
| P P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words... |
pee |
| R R R is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R... |
er |
| S S S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent... |
es |
| Š Š The grapheme Š, š is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with , but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.For use in computer... |
šee |
| Z Z Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal... |
zee |
| Ž Ž The grapheme Ž is formed from Latin Z with the addition of caron . It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative, a sound similar to English g in mirage, or Portuguese and French j... |
žee |
| T T T is the 20th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets... |
tee |
| U U U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details.... |
uu |
| V V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.... |
vee |
| Y Y Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound... |
yy |
| Ä Ä "Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :... |
ää |
| Ö Ö "Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut... |
öö |
See also
- Karelian languageKarelian languageKarelian language is a Finnic language spoken mainly in the Russian Republic of Karelia. Linguistically Karelian is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland and some Finnish linguists even classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish...
- Latin alphabetLatin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
- Ludic languageLudic languageLudic or Ludian or Ludic Karelian is a Finnic language in the Uralic language family. Some consider it a transitional language between Olonets Karelian language and Veps language. It is spoken by 3,000 people in the Republic of Karelia in Russia, near the northwestern shore of Lake Onega,...
- Olonets KarelianOlonets KarelianLivvi-Karelian is a Finnic language of the Uralic family. spoken by Olonets Karelians , traditionally inhabiting the area between Ladoga and Onega lakes, northward of Svir River...
External links
- Karelian language on Omniglot
- Karelian alphabet (in Karelian)
- Orthography of Tver Karelian (in Finnish)
Cyrillic forms of Karelian
- "Kyrilliseen aakkostoon siirtyminen", Neuvostoliiton kielipolitiikkaa: Karjalan kirjakielen suunnittelu 1930-luvulla, Esa Anttikoski, Joensu University
- Дядя Римусан Суарнат Uncle RemusUncle RemusUncle Remus is a fictional character, the title character and fictional narrator of a collection of African American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881...
by Joel Chandler HarrisJoel Chandler HarrisJoel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years...
, translation into Karelian (1939 Cyrillic alphabet)