Re: Soft sign in Russian verb endings

From: Nigel Greenwood (ndsg_mmii_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 01/12/05 

Date: 12 Jan 2005 09:31:37 -0800

Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
> On 11 Jan 2005 09:59:45 +0100, Arndt Jonasson
> <do-not-use@invalid.net> wrote:
>
> >What is the historic explanation of the soft sign used at the end
> >of 2nd person singular present tense verb forms in Russian?
>
> The 2nd. person singular ending used to be -s^i, with a full
> vowel -i (although this was possibly a Church Slavicism, the
> popular pronunciation always having been -s^I, with a front
> yer).

This is reminiscent of modern Romanian, in which final -i in many cases
does little more than indicate palatalization: eg BucureSti, pronounced
/buku"reSt'/. I don't know how this was written in Cyrillic when
Rumanian used that script.

Nigel

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