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In my limited experience, down to 1918 it's perfectly understandable, the earlier than that the less intelligible it becomes, with "point of no return" around late 18th century.
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Mar 16, 2015 18:34
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The major thing with Russian is that the alphabet changed a few times (last time being 1917), with certain letters appearing or being discarded, so that alone makes reading old texts a bitch.
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Mar 16, 2015 21:22
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Dropping letters isn't such a big deal. I'd say around Peter the Great's time you would still be able to figure it out, assuming you are well read enough to know archaic synonyms for things.
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Mar 17, 2015 20:48
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Yeah, stuff around Peter the Great's time is still legible but earlier texts tend to get more and more confusing, with medieval Russian probably being harder to understand than medieval English. As for pre-Revolution alphabet, it's not that different from the current one (it has the latin "i" instead of и and the archaic almost never pronounceable "Ѣ") - I have been recently reading some scans of WW1 era Russian newspapers and I understand everything perfectly, oddly enough the Russian of that time has perhaps even more foreign words in it, there are many English and French loan words. Currently, the letter "ё" is being phased out of use and people tend to write "е" instead, which is probably extremely confusing for foreigners learning Russian because you're just supposed to know which words have a "ё" in them even if it's not spelled. There are people who stand up for "ё" but nobody except for monarchists defends "Ѣ".
Cat Planet fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 21:01
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I can probably make some sense of much earlier texts, despite the fuckers' tendency to drop all vowels and squish the consonants together. As for Ѣ, people only seem to use it in fake "ye olde" speech, I have never seen anyone seriously advocate for its return. Edit: ё is a perfectly reasonable and necessary character.
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Mar 17, 2015 23:34
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