Jill Holder, age 15, of Las Vegas, Nev., for her question:
WHEN DID THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE DEVELOP?
The Russian language, the official language of the Soviet Union, belongs to the eastern group of the Slavic branch of Indo European languages. Writing in Russian began at the end of the 10th century after the conversion of the empire to Christianity.
The written language introduced by the missionaries was Old Church Slavonic, based on a dialect of Old Bulgarian. At the time of its introduction, Old Church Slavonic was readily understood by eastern Slavs.
Gradually, however, the difference between the written and the spoken language increased, the spoken language undergoing a number of simplifications in both its phonemic (sound) and morphological (word forming) structure.
Old Church Slavonic continued to be used as the literary language until the end of the 17th century. Only in administrative and legal matters was writing completely free from old church Slavonic influences.
In the 18th century the secularization of culture that occured during the reign of the Peter the Great caused a great upheaval in language.
Old Church Slavonic was unable to encompass the many scientific, technological, cultural and political concepts that Peter introduced, and a written language developed that was actually a mixture of styles: the archaic Old Church Slavonic, the vernacular and recently borrowed Western elements.
Gradually a new norm arose and reached its present state in the first half of the 19th century.
The Russian alphabet, also called the Cyrillic alphabet, has 33 letters. Spelling is basically, though not completely, phonetic. The rules of pronunciation are few and simple.
The Russian language is one of the five official languages of the United Nations.
The Russian language includes three groups of dialects: northern, southern and central, the last named a transitional group combining both northern and southern features.
The standard Russian is based on a central dialect of Moscow.
Russian has no articles, either definite or indefinite. The three grammatical genders into which all Russian nouns fall are masculine, feminine and neuter. The nouns are declined according to case and number. The six cases are the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental and prepositional, and the two numbers are the singular and the plural.
Adjectives agree with nouns in gender, case and number.
The verb has three tenses: present, past and future. In addition it has the category of aspect. The two aspects are the imperfective, presenting the action as a process of repetition, and the perfective, presenting the action as a unifed whole, usually from the point of view of its completion.