Belarusian Alphabet - History

History

The alphabet of the Medieval Cyrillics (11th century) included forty-three letters. During the evolution of the Belarusian Alphabet, fifteen letters were dropped, the last four of them going after the introduction of the first official Belarusian grammar in 1918, and four new letters were added, thus producing the modern layout of thirty-two letters.

The new letters were:

• Letter <э> appeared in the Belarusian texts about the end of the 15th century.
• Letter <й> evolved from <и> combined with diacritical sign by the end of the 16th century (compare: in Russian alphabet since 1735).
• Letter <ё> was adopted from Russian alphabet by the half of the 19th century (compare: in Russian alphabet since 1797).
• Letter <ў> was proposed by Russian linguist Pyotr Bezsonov in 1870.

The Belarusian alphabet, in its modern form has formally existed since the adoption of the Branislaw Tarashkyevich's Belarusian grammar for the use in the Soviet state school system in 1918 Before that, several slightly different versions of the alphabet were used informally.

In the 1920s and, notably, at the Belarusian Academical Conference (1926), miscellaneous changes of the Belarusian alphabet were being proposed. Notably, replacing <й> with <ј>, and/or replacing <е>, <ё>, <ю>, <я> with <је> (or else with <јє>), <јо>, <ју>, <ја>, respectively, and/or replacing <ы> with <и>, and/or introducing <ґ> (see also Ge with upturn), and/or introducing special graphemes/ligatures for affricates <дж>, <дз> etc. etc. Even the introducing of the Latin script was contemplated at one moment (e.g., proposal of Zhylunovich at the Belarusian Academical Conference (1926)). None of this was implemented, though.

Notable Belarusian linguist Yan Stankyevich in his later works suggested completely different layout of the alphabet. (see also Belarusian Latin alphabet, Ge with upturn):

Note: proper names and places' names are rendered in BGN/PCGN romanization of Belarusian.