Kathryn Szczepanska - Russian A Self Teaching Guide

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Van Campen and Dina B. Crockettthat they were right about everything. I am grateful to the editors at John Wiley & Sons for their unstinting generosity of time and labor, especially to John Simko for his attention to detail, Jeff Golick for his patience, and copy editor Dobrochna Dyrcz-Freeman for her sharp eye and mind. To Stan and Nancy, the sine qua non of my existence, a big fat punch in the nose. And to my Muse and herself a future author, Pamela Rose Machado, thanks for keeping me up at all hours of the day and night, and for simply being you.

It is attributed to the Greek monks Cyrill and Methodius, who came as missionaries to Christianize the Slavic countries and left their mark on the language as well. Modified forms of this alphabet are still in use today in countries other than Russia, including Bulgaria and some of the new nations of the former Yugoslavia. Approximately one-third of the Cyrillic alphabet consists of letters that are identical to the Roman alphabet, with a phonetic value that is either almost equal or similar. Another third of the letters are recognizable to Westerners because of their Greek origin: n is the Greek pi, p is the Greek rho, and so forth. The final third consists of letters that were created to represent sounds in the Slavic languages that had no counterpart in the original Greek of the missionary monks. Some of these letters have a Hebrew origin, such as the letter in [sh].1 Although there are visual and phonetic similarities, almost no Russian letter is pronounced in quite the same way as its English counterpart.