Открыть для себя алфавит русского языка

Открыть для себя алфавит русского языка

Discovering the alphabet of the Russian language

 

One objective of this exercise is to learn the sound system of the alphabet used in the Russian language.  This alphabet is called Cyrillic after a Saint of the Russian Orthodox Church, Cyril.  He and his brother Methodius are said to have developed the alphabet which is used in Russian and several other Slavic languages.  There remains some debate over who actually created the alphabet, however there is evidence that the alphabet dates back to the 9^th century.

 

Procedure:

1. You will work with a partner and each group will look at two maps of Russia.  One map has cities written in Russian with the Cyrillic alphabet, the other has the same cities “transliterated” into the Latin (our) alphabet.

 

2. You will compare the Russian and English transliterated spellings of each city to determine what sound each letter of the Russian alphabet makes.

 

3. Record your answers on the handout: next to the Russian letter write the sound you think it makes using Latin (English) letters.

 

4. We will compare our answers with each other to see how close we are to knowing the correct sound for each letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.

 

Here are some hints:

·        Sometimes it takes two Latin letters to make the sound of one Cyrillic letter.

·        Some Cyrillic letters may make no apparent sound.

·        The letters and sounds we use for English will only approximate the sounds in Russian.

·        We will need to listen carefully to imitate the real Russian sound system.

·        You may want to start with cities that have fewer letters (like Уфа)