On 11.7.2009 3:51, William Holste wrote:
>
>> 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.


Dear Father,

What I have seen is books that either omit the stresses or have
them inconsistently, so that they are left out in every third
word or so, or in more extended passages. For instance for one
book that I have been using I have had to take the missing
stresses from a classic orthography Sluzhebnik and other proper
service books, or sometimes just to guess them.

An additional nuisance is caused by the fact that the current
standard fonts lack accents for Cyrillic letters. So, texts in
the internet very often omit the stresses altogether.

>> 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*.

Well, that being the case, why not use Russian?

>> 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 [= Serbs]
> are using the modern language more often, as are many of
> those Ukrainians who prefer Ukrainian to Russian.

The actual case for Bulgarians and Serbs is that virtually
whatever they sing, they sing it in Slavonic. (Recently I
attended a Serbian service in Romania, in which only the Creed
was sung in Serbian (even if most of the read parts were). I have
a similar experience for Bulgaria; however, there are minor
churches there where more Bulgarian is actually sung. But this is
not the case in cathedrals. Bulgarian service books are often
bilingual; I make regular use of a Bulgarian Chasoslov, because
it has been well typeset, and the binding is better than in the
Russian books that I have. Also Bulgarians, nowadays, print
church music in civil orthography, which is a bit problematic to
use, as they have the yery substituted by i, and mostly omit the
soft signs. So, to make use of the music, one needs first to
revise the lyrics.)

In Ukraine, I suppose that the situation is similar, even if in
some places they sing in the vernacular (what I have learnt,
especially the Byzantine Catholics may use all Ukrainian). And
again, when they write Slavonic in the civil script, the result
is a bit problematic to decipher (for instance, yat is
substituted by i; so: mnogaja leta becomes mnogaja lita; pesn'
becomes pisn', and so on).

> 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.

This makes sense; however, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest them to
consider learning to read Slavonic in the proper orthography.
That way they would be able to start to understand more of what
is in there. Namely, there are certain morphological distinctions
that are made in the classical orthography but which can't be
indicated with the civil script.

Of course not all believers are able to do that, for sure. The
additional issue is that until these days, it hasn't been
technologically unproblematic or cost-effective to typeset new
books in the classical orthography. Some have been printed
recently, but the typographical quality is still inferior to the
pre-Revolutionary books. I have never encountered a newly-typeset
Prayer Book of that sort, so one will need to resort to what is
available.

> Oh, and don't forget, all the most important words are
> abbreviated, so you have to memorize those separately.

These can be mastered surprisingly quickly.

- Jopi Harri