On 11.7.2009 1:05, William Holste wrote:

> I would advance one other reason for some use of new
> orthography in Slavonic texts, and that is to make them
> accessible to a great many people who do not read Slavonic.

The new orthography is of little help unless the stresses are
indicated. Books without stresses marked consistently are of no
use for anyone, except perhaps for someone who is already
proficient in Slavonic.

> How many contemporary Russians would simply choose not to pray
> at all if they had no access to prayer books printed in civil
> script?

Or how many would simply choose to spend a couple of hours to
learn the Slavonic orthography? Heck, it quite isn't Glagolithic.

(Well, my experience is that the ordinary Russian tends to
stammer in reading aloud the Creed in *Russian*, as can happen in
a baptism, for instance. Probably partially because the words are
unfamiliar, and the stresses haven't been indicated. With
Slavonic without stresses the result is plain weird.)

> For that matter, I have found texts of the hours, etc.
> in civil script to be a very useful tool for beginning
> readers, who often need "training wheels," so to speak.

With very little effort the original orthography can be mastered
better than the secularized reduction.

But in practice, when I engrave music with lyrics in Slavonic, I
tend to prefer the classical orthography, and secondarily the
Petrine (= "old") civil orthography (preferably amended with
stresses). This is because if one writes the Slavonic in the
Soviet orthography, the music is accessible to those using the
Russian pronunciation of Slavonic, but hardly to anyone else,
like Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Serbs etc. These peoples exist, really.

- Jopi Harri