as in chair
Шш
Щщ
ъ
Ы
ь
Ээ
Юю
Яя
Picture this: The year is sometime around AD 863. Two Byzantine monks and brothers, Cyril and Methodius, were commissioned by their emperor to Christianize the East European pagan tribes. To carry out the emperor’s order, the two brothers had to transcribe the Bible into Slavic. This task was very daunting because the Slavs didn’t have any written language at the time, and the Slavic dialect they were working with contained a lot of bizarre sounds not found in any other language. The brothers’ solution was to create an alphabet based on the Greek alphabet and certain old Latin words and sounds (which explains why some Cyrillic letters look and sound similar to Latin, which is the language much of English is based on). In other words, the Cyrillic alphabet, which was named after Cyril, is a mishmash of Greek and Latin spiced with a couple of Hebrew letters for good measure. The result was an alphabet that contains practically every sound necessary for the correct pronunciation of Russian. Cyrillic script is now used by more than 70 languages, ranging from Eastern Europe’s Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian) to Central Asia’s Altaic languages (Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kirghiz). Truth be told, however, after the collapse of the Soviet Union these former Soviet republics have been moving away from a Cyrillic-based alphabet toward a Latin-based one. Most people in these areas, especially those of the older generation who lived under the Soviet regime, speak and write Russian fluently.
I know you!: Familiar-looking, same-sounding letters
Xx, for example. Guess what? Some (but not all!) of them even sound like English letters. The letters that look like English and are pronounced like English letters are
Aa: pronounced as ah or uh, depending on the stress (ah in a stressed syllable and uh in an unstressed syllable)
Кк: pronounced as k
Mм: pronounced as m
Oo: pronounced as oh or ah, depending on the stress (oh in a stressed syllable and ah in an unstressed syllable)
Tт: pronounced as t
Playing tricks: Familiar-looking, different-sounding letters
Bв: The capital letter in this pair looks exactly like the English B, but don’t trust appearances: The letter is pronounced like the English letter v, as in victor or vase.
Ee: English speakers very often feel an irresistible urge to say it like ee, as in the English word geese — but that sound in Russian is made by the letter И. In fact, it should be pronounced as ye in yesterday. Be aware, though, that the letter Eeis sometimes pronounced as ee, but only in an unstressed position in a word.
Ёё: Note the diaeresis (two cute little dots), and don’t confuse this one with the English letter E — Ee and Ёё are two different letters! Ёё is pronounced like the yo in yoke.
Hн: This letter looks like the English H, but actually, it’s pronounced like n, as in Nick.
Pp: In Russian, this letter is pronounced like an r, not like the English letter P, as in Peter.
Cc: This letter is always pronounced like the s in sun, never like the k in cake.
Уу: This letter is pronounced like the oo in shoot, never like the y in yes.
Xx: Never pronounce this letter z or ks, like the first and last x, respectively, in the word Xerox. In Russian, the sound it represents is a coarse-sounding, guttural kh, similar to the German ch. (See “Surveying sticky sounds” later in this chapter for info on pronouncing this sound.)
How bizarre: Weird-looking letters
As you’ve probably noticed, quite a few Russian letters don’t look like English letters at all:
Бб
Гг
Дд
Жж
Зз
Ии
