The letter E owes its appearance to changes in Russian phonetics. Once upon a time, after soft consonants, O was not pronounced. That is why they said, for example, not a dog, but a dog. But at some point, E turned into O: this is how the modern pronunciation of words such as honey, everything, and many others arose. True, for a long time there was no new designation for this sound. Those who wrote calmly got along with the letters O and E: bees, honey. But in the 18th century, these words began to be written differently, using the combination io (all-all). It was then that it became obvious: a new letter is needed! Princess Dashkova and the writer Karamzin proposed replacing two signs with one. This is how the letter Y was born.
Have you considered any other options?
Of course. V different time appeared different ideas replacing the letter E. We could now write the same pronoun “everything” as “everything”. Both in the 19th and in the 20th centuries, a wide variety of proposals were heard: ö , ø , ε , ę , ē , ĕ ... However, none of these options was approved.
Many did not like the letter E and still do not like it. Why?
Long time"Yokanie" was considered a sign of common speech. The letter was new, so it was treated with suspicion and even some contempt - as something alien that did not correspond to Russian linguistic traditions.
But there is one more, very simple reason dislike - the letter E is inconvenient to write, for this you need to perform three actions at once: write the letter itself, and then put two dots above it. Such a complex letter was perceived as a burden, some linguists noted. It was also not easy for those who typed texts from Yo on typewriters. Soviet typists had to press three keys at once: letters e, carriage return, quotes.
By the way, even now they joke about those who type texts from E on a computer: "Beware of people who are typing words with E: if they reach it on the keyboard, they will reach you!"
Is Ё a full-fledged letter, the same as all the others?
Complex issue. Since e appeared, the opinions about her were the most contradictory. Some linguists did not consider it an independent letter. For example, in an article of 1937 A. A. Reformatsky wrote: “Is there a letter in the Russian alphabet e? No. There is only a diacritical mark "umlaut" or "trema" (two dots above the letter), which is used to avoid possible misunderstandings ... "
Many languages have these icons over letters. And the speakers of these languages, as a rule, are very jealous of them. In France, for example, the government’s attempt to abandon the sign "axan sirconflex" (house above the letter) as part of the spelling reform caused a real storm: the French were ready to take to the streets to protect their favorite sign.
Does our Yo have defenders?
There are, and some more! Fighters for "rights" are called the letter E defiers ( do not forget to reach for the letter E when you write this word). Efikators ensure that the use of a letter e has become ubiquitous and mandatory. The fact is that they perceive words with E instead of E as an insult to the Russian language and even to Russia as a whole. For example, the writer, head of the "Union of Efikators" VT Chumakov calls the neglect of the letter E not only a spelling mistake, but also a political, spiritual, and moral mistake.
And linguists agree with him?
No, linguists are just not that categorical. Chief Editor portal "Gramota.ru" Vladimir Pakhomov calls the statement that E instead of E is a gross spelling error, one of the myths about the Russian language. Of course, there are arguments for and against. For example, compulsory Ё would help to memorize the correct pronunciation of some names, surnames and names of settlements. But there is also a danger: if Y is made obligatory, then the texts of the classics may begin to "modernize", and then Y will appear where it should not be at all.
In what words is Yo pronounced by mistake?
There are quite a few such words. You can often hear scam instead of scam or custody instead of guardianship... In fact, these words do not contain the letter E, and the pronunciation with E is considered a gross spelling mistake. The same list includes words such as grenadier ( not a grenadier!) , expired in the meaning of time (one cannot say elapsed period),settled ( in no way settled!),life and being . Here, by the way, it is appropriate to recall the director Yakin from the film "Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession". Yakin utters the word life absolutely true - through E, and not through E.
Anewborn also without E?
You can write this word with E instead of E, but here it is pronounced with E. That's right - a newborn, not a newborn!
Also with Ё words are pronounced nasty ( remember it, this word is very often pronounced incorrectly!), spearhead, worthless, windsurfing, bled.
I'm completely confused. Still, if I don’t want to reach for E on the keyboard, I don’t betray the Russian language and the Motherland?
Of course no! There is no mistake or betrayal in the rejection of YO. One cannot do without the letter E except in textbooks for junior schoolchildren and in manuals for foreigners who do not know how to read and pronounce Russian words. In other cases, the decision is yours. However, if in your correspondence about the weather you suddenly want to write something like “Tomorrow we will finally take a break from the cold”, try to reach Y.
For a long time, there was no famous letter "ё" in the Russian language. But this letter can boast that the date of its birth is known - namely, November 29, 1783. The “mother” of the letter is Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, an enlightened princess.
Let's remember the details of this event ...
In the house of Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, who was at that time the director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, a meeting of the Academy of Literature, created shortly before that date, was held. At that time, G.R.Derzhavin, D.I.Fonvizin, Ya.B. Knyazhnin, Metropolitan Gabriel, and others were present.
And once during one of the meetings, she asked Derzhavin to write the word "Christmas tree". Those present took the offer as a joke. After all, it was clear to everyone that it was necessary to write "iolka". Then Dashkova asked a simple question. Its meaning made academicians think. Indeed, is it reasonable to designate one sound when writing with two letters? The princess's proposal to introduce into the alphabet a new letter "e" with two dots on top to denote the sound "io" was appreciated by experts in literature. This story happened in 1783. And then off we go. Derzhavin began to use the letter "e" in personal correspondence, then Dmitriev published a book "my trinkets" with this letter, and then Karamzin joined the "yo movement".
The image of the new letter was probably borrowed from the French alphabet. A similar letter is used, for example, in the spelling of the car brand Citroën, although it sounds completely different in this word. Cultural figures supported Dashkova's idea, and the letter stuck. Derzhavin began to use the letter ё in personal correspondence and for the first time used it when writing the surname - Potemkin. However, in print - among the typographic letters - the letter ё appeared only in 1795. Even the first book with this letter is known - this is the book of the poet Ivan Dmitriev "My trinkets". The first word, over which two dots were blackened, was the word "everything", followed by the words: light, stump, etc.
A well-known new letter e became thanks to the historian N.M. Karamzin. In 1797, Nikolai Mikhailovich decided to replace two letters in the word "sl io zy "on one letter ё. So, with light hand Karamzin, the letter "e" took its place under the sun and was fixed in the Russian alphabet. Due to the fact that N.M. Karamzin was the first to use the letter ё in a printed edition that came out in a fairly large circulation, some sources, in particular, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, it was he who was mistakenly indicated as the author of the letter ё.
On the first book of the poetic anthology "Aonida" published by him (1796) he printed the words "dawn", "eagle", "moth", "tears" and the first verb with the letter e - "flowed". But, oddly enough, in the famous "History of the Russian State" Karamzin did not use the letter "e".
In the alphabet, the letter fell into place in the 1860s. IN AND. Dahl put ё together with the letter "e" in the first edition of " Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language ”. In 1875, Leo Tolstoy, in his "New Alphabet", sent her to the 31st place, between yat and the letter e. However, the use of this symbol in typography and publishing has been fraught with difficulties due to its non-standard height. Therefore, officially the letter ё entered the alphabet and received serial number 7 only in Soviet time- December 24, 1942. However, for many decades, publishers continued to use it only if urgent need and even then mostly in encyclopedias. As a result, the letter "ё" disappeared from the spelling (and then pronunciation) of many surnames: Cardinal Richelieu, philosopher Montesquieu, poet Robert Burns, microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur, mathematician Pafnutiy Chebyshev (in the latter case, even the place of stress was changed: Chebyshev; exactly like this the same beets became beets). We say and write Depardieu instead of Depardieu, Roerich (who is pure Roerich), Roentgen instead of the correct Roentgen. By the way, Leo Tolstoy is actually Leo (like his hero - the Russian nobleman Levin, and not the Jew Levin).
The letter ё also disappeared from the spellings of many geographical names - Pearl Harbor, Königsberg, Cologne, etc. See, for example, the epigram on Lev Pushkin (the authorship is not exactly clear):
Our friend Pushkin Leo
Not devoid of reason
But with champagne fat pilaf
And duck with milk mushrooms
They will prove us better than words
That he is healthier
Strength of the stomach.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, they "went through" the alphabet, removed the "yat" and fit and izhitsa, but did not touch the letter E. It is at Soviet power dots above e disappeared in most words for ease of typing. Although no one formally banned or abolished it.
The situation changed dramatically in 1942. To the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Stalin got on the table German maps, in which German cartographers entered the names of our settlements accurate to points. If the village was called "Demino", then it was Demino (and not Demino) that was written in both Russian and German. The Supreme Commander appreciated the enemy's meticulousness. As a result, on December 24, 1942, a decree was issued prescribing the obligatory use of the letter Yo everywhere, from school textbooks to the Pravda newspaper. Well, of course, on the cards. By the way, this order has never been canceled!
Often the letter "ё", on the contrary, is inserted into words in which it is not needed. For example, "swindle" instead of "scam", "being" instead of "being", "custody" instead of "custody". The first Russian world chess champion was actually called Alexander Alekhin and was very indignant when his noble name was spelled incorrectly, “popularly” - Alekhin. In general, the letter "ё" is contained in more than 12 thousand words, in about 2.5 thousand surnames of Russian citizens and the former USSR, in thousands of place names.
A categorical opponent of using this letter when writing is designer Artemy Lebedev. Somehow she did not like him. I must say that it is really inconveniently located on the computer keyboard. You can, of course, do without it, as, for example, the text will be understandable, even if s ngo sklcht vs glsn bkv. But is it worth it?
V last years a number of authors, in particular Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Polyakov and others, some periodicals, as well as the scientific publishing house "Great Russian Encyclopedia" publish their texts with the obligatory use of the discriminated letter. Well, the creators of the new Russian electric car gave the name to their brainchild from this one letter.
Some statistics
In 2013, the letter Ёё will be 230 years old!
She is in 7th (lucky!) Place in the alphabet.
In Russian, there are about 12,500 words with the letter E, of which about 150 words begin with it and about 300 words end with it!
For every hundred characters of the text, on average, there is 1 letter ё. ...
There are words in our language with two letters E: "three-star", "four-bucket".
In Russian, there are several traditional names in which the letter Ё is present:
Artyom, Parmen, Peter, Savel, Seliverst, Semyon, Fedor, Yarem; Alena, Matryona, Fyokla and others.
Optional use letters e leads to erroneous readings and the inability to restore the meaning of the word without additional explanations, for example:
Loan-loan; perfect-perfect; tears, tears; palate-palate; chalk-chalk; donkey-donkey; oars-oars ...
And, of course, a classic example from "Peter the Great" by A.K. Tolstoy:
Under such a sovereign take a break!
It was meant - " take a break". Do you feel the difference?
How do you read "We All Sing"? Are we all singing? Are we all going to eat?
And the surname of the French actor will be Depardieu, not Depardieu. (see Wikipedia)
And, by the way, A. Dumas has the name of the cardinal not Richelieu, but Richelieu. (see Wikipedia)
And you need to pronounce the name of the Russian poet correctly Fet, not Fet.
December 24, 1942 by order people's commissar education of the RSFSR Vladimir Potemkin, the obligatory use of the letter "ё" was introduced in school practice. From that day on, this letter, which still evokes many conversations and disputes around itself, has officially entered the Russian alphabet. And took an honorable place in it - 7th place.
"RG" cites a number of interesting and little-known facts about the letter "E" and its history.
Princess Christmas tree
The "god" mother of the letter "e" can be considered Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. On November 29 (18), 1783, one of the first meetings of the Russian Academy of Sciences was held, at which the princess was also present among the respected poets, writers and philosophers of that time. The project of the 6-volume "Dictionary of the Russian Academy" was discussed. The academicians were about to go home when Ekaterina Romanovna asked those present if anyone could write the word "Christmas tree". The academicians decided that the princess was joking, but she, having written the word she uttered "Iolka", asked: "Is it legal to represent one sound with two letters?" And she proposed to use the new letter "e" "to express words and reprimands, for example, such as" matery "," Iolka "," Iozh. " St. Petersburg Gabriel Thus, November 29 (18), 1783 can be considered the birthday of "e".
Poet Gabriel Derzhavin was one of the first to use "e" in personal correspondence. In the printed edition, the letter first appeared in the late 1890s - in the book of the poet Ivan Dmitriev "And My Trinkets", published in 1795 at the Moscow University Printing House. There are the words "everything", "light", "stump", "bezmerytna", "cornflower". However, in scientific works at that time, the letter "ё" was still not used. For example, in the "History of the Russian State" by Karamzin (1816-1829) the letter "e" is absent. Although many researchers and philologists credit the writer-historian Karamzin with the introduction of the letter "e". Among her opponents were such famous figures as the writer and poet Alexander Sumarokov and the scientist and poet Vasily Trediakovsky. Thus, its use was optional.
Not without Stalin
On December 23, 1917 (January 5, 1918), a decree was published, signed by the People's Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, which instructed "all government and state publications" from January 1 (old style) 1918 to "be printed according to the new spelling." It also said: "To recognize the use of the letter" e "as desirable, but optional. And only on December 24, 1942, according to the order of the People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR Vladimir Potemkin, the mandatory use of the letter" e "in school was introduced.
There is a legend that Stalin personally had a hand in this. On December 6, 1942, the head of the Council of People's Commissars, Yakov Chadayev, brought an order for signature, in which the names of several generals were printed with the letter "e", not "e". Stalin flew into a rage, and the very next day, December 7, 1942, the letter "e" appeared in all articles of the Pravda newspaper. However, at first publishers used the letter with two dots at the top, but in the 50s of the twentieth years they began to use it only if necessary. The selective use of the letter "ё" was fixed in the rules of Russian spelling in 1956.
To write or not to write
In accordance with the letter of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation dated 03.05.2007 "On the decisions of the Interdepartmental Commission on the Russian Language" it is obligatory to write the letter "ё" in cases where the wrong reading of a word is possible, for example, in proper names, since ignoring the letter " g "in this case is a violation of the Federal Law" On the State Language of the Russian Federation ".
According to the current rules of Russian spelling and punctuation, the letter "ё" is written in the following cases:
When it is necessary to prevent incorrect reading and understanding of a word, for example: "we learn" as opposed to "learn"; "everything" as opposed to "all"; "perfect" (participle) as opposed to "perfect" (adjective), etc .;
- when you need to indicate the pronunciation of a little-known word, for example: the Olekma river.
- In special texts: primers, school textbooks of the Russian language, textbooks of orthoepy, etc., as well as in dictionaries to indicate the place of stress and correct pronunciation.
According to the same rules, the letter "e" can be used selectively in ordinary printed texts. But at the request of the author or editor, any text or book can be printed with the letter "e".
Especially if there are rarely used, borrowed or Difficult words: for example, "gueuze", "surfing", "flair", "harder", "crack". Or you need to indicate the correct stress: for example, "fable", "brought", "carried away", "condemned", "newborn", "filler" (the letter "e" is always stressed).
Leo instead of Leo
The optional use of the letter "ё" has led to the fact that today names are written without it:
The philosopher and writer Montesquieu;
- X-ray physics;
- physicist Anders Jonas Angstrom, as well as angstrom units named after him;
- microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur;
- artist and philosopher Nicholas Roerich;
- Nazi leaders Goebbels and Goering;
- the writer Leo Tolstoy (the writer himself pronounced his name in accordance with the old Moscow speech tradition - Leo; members of his family, close friends and numerous acquaintances also called Tolstoy).
The surnames Khrushchev, Gorbachev are also written without the "e".
Other interesting facts
In 2005, in Ulyanovsk, by the decision of the city administration, a monument was erected to the letter "yo" - triangular prism from granite, on which the lowercase "ё" is embossed.
There are about 12.5 thousand words with "e" in Russian. Of these, about 150 begin with "ё" and about 300 end with "ё".
In Russian, words with several letters "ё" are also possible, usually these are compound words: "three-star", "four-bucket".
More than 300 surnames differ only in the presence of "e" or "e" in them. For example, Lezhnev - Lezhnev, Demina - Demina. The correctness of spelling of such surnames in personal documents and various property and inheritance matters is especially important. A mistake can deprive a person, for example, of inheritance. For example, the Elkin family from Barnaul reported that in the 1930s their ancestor lost his inheritance due to the fact that it was registered on the Elkin family. And a resident of Perm, Tatyana Teterkina, almost lost her Russian citizenship due to the incorrect spelling of her last name in her passport.
There is a rare Russian surname Yo of French origin, which in French written in four letters.
The surname of the famous Russian poet Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (Foeth - German in origin) was distorted when his first book was printed. He gained fame already under the name Fet. At the same time, he spent part of his life under the name Shenshin.
Once upon a time relatively painlessly left our alphabet "yati" and "eri", fita and izhytsa - as if they did not exist at all. A slight nostalgia slips through, perhaps when you see a sign like "Traktir", and even then among older people, young people - up to a lantern.
But as for the letter "E" in the rules of the Russian language, there is a whole epic, and it is not a sin to recall its key moments. "History of the issue" - as it is customary to express it in scientific circles.
The wine hit my head!
The honor of the discovery and introduction and the wide use of this letter are shared by the associate of Catherine II, Princess Elizabeth Romanovna Dashkova (who is also the president of the Imperial Academy) and Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, a poet, publicist, and historian. By the way, in Ulyanovsk - in the homeland of Karamzin - there is even a monument to this letter. Dashkova at one of the meetings of the Academy openly “pushed through” the expediency of introducing this letter, but another 12 years passed before the letter appeared in print.
Strictly speaking, the first to use it was Karamzin's close friend (and also a poet) Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev, and Karamzin sanctified it with his authority. It happened in 1795-1796. According to the widespread version, Dashkova decided to innovate, being a lover of the fizzy drink, the famous French champagne brand Moët & Chandon. There are just those notorious dots above the letter "e".
Scrape out the very spirit!
Not to say that everyone followed Dashkova and Karamzin. Archaists and Old Believers did not want to give up their positions so easily. So, the former Admiral A.S. Shishkov, who headed the society "Conversation of lovers of Russian literature" - a man of great civic and personal courage, but absolutely devoid of linguistic flair, went to extremes, demanding how to prohibit everything foreign words in Russian, and with his own hand erasing the hated dots in each of the books that caught my eye.
From poets to generalissimo
However, linguistic conservatism was not unique to Shishkov: Russian poets (Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok) stubbornly continued to write "yellow" and "black". The Bolsheviks, who stood last in the pre-revolutionary alphabet, did not touch the Bolsheviks, issuing a decree according to which the spelling of it was recognized as "desirable, but not obligatory."
This continued until the Great Patriotic War when the names of settlements on the maps required maximum accuracy. Stalin personally issued a decree on the ubiquity of the use of Y. Of course, after his death, a rollback followed. And today it is “confusion and vacillation” at all.
They want to destroy them completely!
On one of the Internet resources, Yo is contemptuously called a "non-letter", which sounds good, but, they say, looks bad. Its widespread use is called violence against the reading public.
And it's half the trouble that a strange place is defined on the Y keyboard in the upper left corner. Distortions are evident in the spelling of both proper names (Leo instead of Leo, Montesquieu instead of Montesquieu, Feth instead of Feth), and settlements (Pyongyang instead of Pyongyang, Konigsberg instead of Konigsberg). And what a hassle and headache for passport officers, when Eremenko turns out to be Eremenko, and not only Natalia turns out to be Natalia!
Let's sort it out calmly!
We will not take the side of the "efikators" (supporters of the widespread use of this letter), or their opponents in the question of "write e or e". Let us recall the rule of the "golden mean", consider the basic rules for using E in modern written and printed texts. Moreover, the linguists managed to reach a compromise and consolidate it in a special document - "Rules for spelling and punctuation of the Russian language."
Firstly, even if in Russian there is no rule about a clearly fixed stress, unlike, say, Italian or French, there is almost always an exception for each rule, and in this case it just concerns the letter E, which is always found in the striking position.
Secondly, in books for preschoolers and textbooks for primary school students, E is mandatory - after all, children are just learning and comprehending all the basics of linguistic wisdom and there is no need to complicate this process for them.
Thirdly, Yo will appear in textbooks for foreigners studying Russian.
Fourthly, when it is not entirely clear to us which part of speech is meant, when total value words can be misunderstood (chalk or chalk, bucket or bucket, all or all, sky or palate), writing E will become a lifesaver.
Fifth, E is written in place names, place names, surnames, proper names: Olekma, Vyoshenskaya, Neyolova, etc.
Sixth, E will be required when we are dealing with an unfamiliar, possibly borrowed word (for example, surfing). She will also help to indicate correct stress in this word. So two birds with one stone are killed at once!
Finally, seventh, dictionaries, reference books, encyclopedias — specialized literature — are not just admitted, but demanded.
In general, one should gradually develop a linguistic flair in oneself and adhere to the following rule: if the dots above E do not stand and the meaning of the word is distorted from this, we put them. Otherwise, we vary E and E.
How the letter Ё appeared September 29th, 2017
For a long time, there was no famous letter "ё" in the Russian language. But this letter can boast that the date of its birth is known - namely, November 29, 1783. The “mother” of the letter is Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, an enlightened princess.
Let's remember the details of this event ...
In the house of Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, who was at that time the director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, a meeting of the Academy of Literature, created shortly before that date, was held. At that time, G.R.Derzhavin, D.I.Fonvizin, Ya.B. Knyazhnin, Metropolitan Gabriel, and others were present.
And once during one of the meetings, she asked Derzhavin to write the word "Christmas tree". Those present took the offer as a joke. After all, it was clear to everyone that it was necessary to write "iolka". Then Dashkova asked a simple question. Its meaning made academicians think. Indeed, is it reasonable to designate one sound when writing with two letters? The princess's proposal to introduce into the alphabet a new letter "e" with two dots on top to denote the sound "io" was appreciated by experts in literature. This story happened in 1783. And then off we go. Derzhavin began to use the letter "e" in personal correspondence, then Dmitriev published a book "my trinkets" with this letter, and then Karamzin joined the "yo movement".
The image of the new letter was probably borrowed from the French alphabet. A similar letter is used, for example, in the spelling of the car brand Citroën, although it sounds completely different in this word. Cultural figures supported Dashkova's idea, and the letter stuck. Derzhavin began to use the letter ё in personal correspondence and for the first time used it when writing the surname - Potemkin. However, in print - among the typographic letters - the letter ё appeared only in 1795. Even the first book with this letter is known - this is the book of the poet Ivan Dmitriev "My trinkets". The first word, over which two dots were blackened, was the word "everything", followed by the words: light, stump, etc.
A well-known new letter e became thanks to the historian N.M. Karamzin. In 1797, Nikolai Mikhailovich decided to replace two letters in the word "sl io zy "on one letter ё. So, with the light hand of Karamzin, the letter "e" took its place under the sun and was fixed in the Russian alphabet. Due to the fact that N.M. Karamzin was the first to use the letter ё in a printed edition that came out in a fairly large circulation, some sources, in particular, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, it was he who was mistakenly indicated as the author of the letter ё.
In the first book of the poetic anthology "Aonida" (1796) published by him, he printed the words "dawn", "eagle", "moth", "tears" and the first verb with the letter e - "flowed". But, oddly enough, in the famous "History of the Russian State" Karamzin did not use the letter "e".
In the alphabet, the letter fell into place in the 1860s. IN AND. Dahl placed ё together with the letter "e" in the first edition of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. In 1875, Leo Tolstoy, in his "New Alphabet", sent her to the 31st place, between yat and the letter e. However, the use of this symbol in typography and publishing has been fraught with difficulties due to its non-standard height. Therefore, the letter ё officially entered the alphabet and received the ordinal number 7 only in Soviet times - December 24, 1942. However, for many decades, publishers continued to use it only when absolutely necessary, and even then mainly in encyclopedias. As a result, the letter "ё" disappeared from the spelling (and then pronunciation) of many surnames: Cardinal Richelieu, philosopher Montesquieu, poet Robert Burns, microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur, mathematician Pafnutiy Chebyshev (in the latter case, even the place of stress was changed: Chebyshev; exactly like this the same beets became beets). We say and write Depardieu instead of Depardieu, Roerich (who is pure Roerich), Roentgen instead of the correct Roentgen. By the way, Leo Tolstoy is actually Leo (like his hero - the Russian nobleman Levin, and not the Jew Levin).
The letter ё also disappeared from the spellings of many geographical names - Pearl Harbor, Königsberg, Cologne, etc. See, for example, the epigram on Lev Pushkin (the authorship is not exactly clear):
Our friend Pushkin Leo
Not devoid of reason
But with champagne fat pilaf
And duck with milk mushrooms
They will prove us better than words
That he is healthier
Strength of the stomach.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, they "went through" the alphabet, removed the "yat" and fit and izhitsa, but did not touch the letter E. It was under Soviet rule that the point over e disappeared in most words for ease of typing. Although no one formally banned or abolished it.
The situation changed dramatically in 1942. The Supreme Commander-in-Chief Stalin got German maps on the table, in which German cartographers entered the names of our settlements down to dots. If the village was called "Demino", then it was Demino (and not Demino) that was written in both Russian and German. The Supreme Commander appreciated the enemy's meticulousness. As a result, on December 24, 1942, a decree was issued prescribing the obligatory use of the letter Yo everywhere, from school textbooks to the Pravda newspaper. Well, of course, on the cards. By the way, this order has never been canceled!
Often the letter "ё", on the contrary, is inserted into words in which it is not needed. For example, "swindle" instead of "scam", "being" instead of "being", "custody" instead of "custody". The first Russian world chess champion was actually called Alexander Alekhin and was very indignant when his noble name was spelled incorrectly, “popularly” - Alekhin. In general, the letter "ё" is contained in more than 12 thousand words, in about 2.5 thousand surnames of citizens of Russia and the former USSR, in thousands of geographical names.
A categorical opponent of using this letter when writing is designer Artemy Lebedev. Somehow she did not like him. I must say that it is really inconveniently located on the computer keyboard. You can, of course, do without it, as, for example, the text will be understandable, even if s ngo sklcht vs glsn bkv. But is it worth it?
In recent years, a number of authors, in particular Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Polyakov and others, some periodicals, as well as the scientific publishing house "Great Russian Encyclopedia" publish their texts with the obligatory use of the discriminated letter. Well, the creators of the new Russian electric car gave the name to their brainchild from this one letter.
Some statistics
In 2017, the letter Ёё turns 234 years old!
She is in 7th (lucky!) Place in the alphabet.
In Russian, there are about 12,500 words with the letter E, of which about 150 words begin with it and about 300 words end with it!
For every hundred characters of the text, on average, there is 1 letter ё. ...
There are words in our language with two letters E: "three-star", "four-bucket".
In Russian, there are several traditional names in which the letter Ё is present:
Artyom, Parmen, Peter, Savel, Seliverst, Semyon, Fedor, Yarem; Alena, Matryona, Fyokla and others.
Optional useletters eleads to erroneous readings and the inability to restore the meaning of the word without additional explanations, for example:
Loan-loan; perfect-perfect; tears, tears; palate-palate; chalk-chalk; donkey-donkey; oars-oars ...