> 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.

And that is why all the new orthography Russian prayer books I've seen mark the
stresses.

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

Very few. Many of my parishioners have a mental block about Slavonic, and assume
that *they* could never possibly read *that*.

> 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.

Yes, they do exist. But the Bulgarians and Romanians are using the modern
language more often, as are many of those Ukrainians who prefer Ukrainian to
Russian. I would never advocate printing the service books in civil script.
You're right, it's actually less convenient in the long run, and limits their
usefulness outside of Russian-speaking circles. But for prayer books and
sborniki printed in Russia, by Russians, for Russian speakers, I do appreciate
the advantage of using civil script. Imagine for a moment: you're a priest, and
someone comes to you wanting to learn how to pray. They know virtually nothing
about Orthodoxy. Which would be more helpful, to give them a prayer book they
can actually read, or to insist that before they can learn to pray they must
first invest time and effort in learning how to read the language the prayers
are written in, with a number of letters that look alike and several that look
nothing like the modern language. Oh,
and don't forget, all the most important words are abbreviated, so you have to
memorize those separately.

In Christ,

Fr. Hermogen