On 11.7.2009 21:23, William Holste wrote:
> --- On Sat, 7/11/09, Jopi Harri <jopi.harri@...> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Most prayer books I have seen only mark the stresses when the
> stress in Slavonic differs from that in modern Russian.

I happen to have books in which some of the stresses have been
occasionally but not regularly omitted for the following types of
words:

1) Words existing in Russian whose stresses in Slavonic are on
the same syllable.

2) Words which, if they existed in Russian, were likely to have
the stress on the same syllable as in Slavonic.

3) Words which have been provided with stresses earlier on that
page or near it.

4) Any words in prayers and other texts whose stresses are
considered common knowledge by the editor.

5) Whole prayers that are considered "common".

6) Words for which the stresses have apparently been left out by
accident (or on the basis of some other strategy).

The result: books too unreliable to be used in public divine
services, unless checked in advance against reliable books and
corrected manually.

But certainly this makes little difference for a Russian
layperson casually reading prayers from the book where a stress
here and there is omitted, and they fail to figure it out correctly.

- Jopi Harri