Before acquiring its modern form, the Russian language has come a long way in its development. The closest to it are two languages at once - Ukrainian and Belarusian.
Instructions
Step 1
Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages belong to the East Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. This means that in the distant past, many European languages had a common Indo-European proto-language. Using the comparative historical method, scholars have compared modern languages, identified similarities and differences, and reconstructed the underlying language.
Step 2
According to research, once upon a time, English, German, Russian, Ukrainian and many other languages were one language. But in connection with the resettlement of the ancient tribes, the language changed, acquired new features of pronunciation and grammatical structure, new lexical units, and subsequently new rules of writing. So, approximately in the 7th-8th centuries. the Old Russian language was formed, which is the "father" of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages.
Step 3
In the course of historical development, the ancient Russian nationality was divided into three closely related nationalities: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, which began to develop independently. But, despite the division, all East Slavic languages have preserved common features.
Step 4
First of all, it should be noted that a significant part of the lexical fund is common. In addition to Proto-Slavic words, there are also common borrowings from Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Baltic, Iranian, Germanic, Caucasian and other languages. Borrowings from French, German and English are typical for the Russian language. In the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, a significant influence of the Polish vocabulary is noted.
Step 5
In phonetics, there are also a number of features that distinguish East Slavic languages from other Indo-European languages. Proto-Slavic letter combinations * or, * ol, * er, * el were transformed into intervocal combinations -oro-, -olo-, -re-, -lo-. Letter combinations * tj, * dj developed into consonants h, j, zh. The l sound was formed from combinations of labial consonants with j. Also, a common feature for East Slavic languages is the reduction, that is, the loss of vowels ъ and ь and their transformation into o and e in strong positions.
Step 6
The grammatical commonality of the Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian languages is their synthetic, or inflectional, structure. This means that grammatical connections between words are mostly expressed using endings (inflections). This difference can be traced in comparison with the Germanic group of languages, which include German and English. These languages are analytical, that is, those in which the creation of grammatical links with the help of prepositions prevails.
