Difference between revisions of "Russian"

Revision as of 01:19, 20 August 2006

This article deals with Russian as it relates to NationStates. For more general information, see the Wikipedia article on this subject.

Russian (русский язык /'ruski jɪ'zɨk/) is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages.

Russian belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, including English, French, and Irish. Written examples are extant from the 10th century onwards.

While it preserves much of its ancient synthetic-inflexional structure and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian shares a large stock of the international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. A language of political importance in the twentieth century, Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations.

Taraskovyan Russian

Russian is an official language of Tarasovka, where ethnic Russians form the majority of the national population. Taraskovyan Russian, as it is unofficially called, retains Slavonic etymology for the words that in “Overseas Russian” (as the universally known Russian is called in Tarasovka) have been overtime replaced by foreign equivalents. Another difference is the presence of the th(as in thought) sound in Taraskovyan Russian, represented by the Greek theta (Θ). As far as grammar goes, nowadays the two languages are very similar in that field. The Taraskovyan Academy has led a language reform to increase conformity between Taraskovyan Russian and "Overseas Russian".

NOTE. Russian is written in a non-Latin script. All examples below are in the Cyrillic alphabet, with transcriptions in SAMPA (without regard to the reduction of unstressed vowels).

See also: Constantian (language)