Ah, but there's the rub: currently new orthography is overwhelmingly the most
common way of printing Slavonic in Russia, and, alas, in America. The
availability of inexpensive mass printings has had a huge influence in the
history of Slavonic. Until the eighteenth century, the Serbs used a Serbian
recension of Slavonic, the Bulgarians a Bulgarian recension, etc. But since they
had almost no printeries, their books were manuscripts. When printed books from
Muscovy became widely availably, they gave the death blow to the other
recensions. The problem now is that new-orthography Slavonic is becoming the
norm and threatening to sweep away proper Slavonic orthography. I suggest that
the reason for this is not educational, since it is not a great task to learn
the old orthography, but political: the war in the iat' (the Bolsheviks actually
sent goon squads to printing shops to confiscate and destroy fonts with the
iat').

The polustav script is another matter. My discussions with educated Russians
lead me to suspect that the biggest problem is with the titla and other
abbreviations. This is anecdotal, of course, and needs confirmation or
refutation by serious studies. Perhaps we are at a juncture when we should
consider resolving these in printing the canonical liturgical books. This would
entail a much more consistent use of capitalization than has been practiced,
because the uncontracted form of "bog" is traditionally an indication that a
pagan deity is meant, and the uncontracted form of "angel" similarly means a
fallen angel. If we were to resolve the contractions, we would need to use
capitals to indicate what was formerly shown by writing bg" and aggl" with
titla.

Stephen


--- In ustav@yahoogroups.com, William Holste <wholste@...> 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.
>
> > 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
>