Re: UCA and Russian letter Ё

From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi>
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2012 21:35:16 +0200

2012-12-21 21:05, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> My Moscow Russian-Norwegian from 1987 and my Pocket Oxford Russian
> Dictionary from 2003 agree that both list words on Ё and Е under the
> same category – namely, under the letter Е.

This appears to be the case in any serious dictionary.

The use of the Cyrillic letter yo (ё, called IO in the Unicode name) has
varied through ages, but it has never been a dominant spelling to use
it. According to “The World’s Writing Systems”, edited by Peter T.
Daniels and William Bright (Oxford University Press, 1995), “The letter
ё is used virtually only in dictionaries or language textbooks.” It may
have become more popular in the Internet, but still less common than
using the letter ye (IE, е) in its stead.

> Fact is, again, that ёлка - "in the wild" - can be written ёлка and
> елка.

And in most contexts, it is written “елка”.

It is of course possible that some people would prefer treating “ё” as a
primarily different letter. But it’s rather illogical to require that it
be treated that way at the start of a word only. I don’t think collation
rules need to accommodate such preferences.

Yucca
Received on Fri Dec 21 2012 - 13:37:04 CST

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