Лёв [lyov] or Лев [lev] Толстой (Leo Tolstoy)? Or a few facts about letter Ё.
It
is actually Лёв
[yo] with ё,
so it should be Лёв
Толстой.
The writer himself
pronounced his name as [lyov] with ё
according to old-Moscow pronunciation.
His
family and friends also called him Лёв
[lyov].
And
a character of his novel “Anna Karenina”
was originally Лёвин
[lyOv-ee-n] but it came out of print
as Левин
[lEv-ee-n].
It
can be very confusing for a person studying the Russian language to
know when to read Ё [yo]
and when Е [e].
Take,
for example, surnames.
In
a lot of foreign names translated into the Russian language the sound Ё [yo] disappears and becomes E [e]:
e.g,
Churchill – there is a sound [yo], one can definitely hear it, but
in Russian it is
Черчилль
[chErch-ee-l’] – no Ё [yo]
whatsoever.
And
in other names, it is written E
but everybody says Ё [yo].
Who in his right mind will even think to say [gᴧrbᴧchEv] instead of [gᴧrbᴧchyOv], though you will never find a printed text where the name of the first and the last President of the Soviet Union is spelt with Ё [yo] as Горбачёв.
So what is it about
letter Ё?
Why does it appear in some words and completely ignored in other?
Letter Ё
as “a national idea”.
In
modern Russia letter
Ё
[yo]
has become “a national symbol” and even has its own monument in Ulyanovsk.
The
argument about the
letter Ё
[yo]
has been going on for a while. It has evolved in one of those arguments
which
are on the border between linguistics and politics, like a dispute
about the
preposition in the expression “in Ukraine”: is it на
Украине or в
Украине?
Some
linguists argue
that the letter Ё
should be used everywhere where it
is pronounced: if we hear Ё
[yo]
we write it down and not E instead
of it. The others say that there is no need to do that because nobody
will ever
think to say Елка
[yElkᴧ] (a fir tree) instead of Ёлка
[yOlkᴧ], even if it is spelt with E
in the text.
Some
people think that
there is no place for the letter Ё
in
the alphabet because it is just a symbol artificially created 200 years
ago to replace
the sound [yo] and the Russian language can comfortably exist without
it.
Princess
Dashkova – a godmother of the letter Ё [yo].
The
7th
letter of the alphabet appeared in the Russian language only at the end
of the
18th century.
It
is believed that the Princess Dashkova
at one of the meetings of the Russian Academy of Sciences wondered why
in the
word Ёлка [yOlkᴧ] (a
fir tree) which in those days was
spelt as “ioлкa”
there
are two letters <io>
to
symbolize one sound [yo]. And she suggested using the letter Ё
instead of writing everywhere two letters <io>
to indicate the sound [yo].
And
of course, it would
not be the history of Russia including the history of linguistics
without...
Stalin.
The
story says, though
nobody knows if it is true or not, that Stalin was about to sign a
decree in
which the surnames of a few generals were typed with E
instead of Ё.
According to the story he got
absolutely furious and the next day the decree was issued ordering to
use the
letter Ё in all printed and written
texts.
So
what are the rules?
Shall
we write the
letter Ё ё every time and
everywhere
we hear it? And is it a mistake not to write it?
The
rules are quite
simple. But the first thing to remember when you study Russian that if
there is
ё in the word – it is always
stressed.
As
to the writing, the
letter Ё should be written in
1)
the
texts for kids and foreign students,
or in any other texts which have the words with the stressed vowels
marked,
including all dictionaries;
2)
in
cases when using letter E instead
of Ё might lead to
misunderstanding, e.g., the word все
[vse] means “everybody” while the
word всё [vsyo] with ё
has a completely different meaning, it means “everything”;
3)
when
it is necessary to draw attention
to the pronunciation of uncommon “exotic” words ,e.g., река
Олёкма
–
river Olyokma.
