| Abbreviations Used in the Dictionary |
A Short Grammar of the Russian Language
| Introduction and Alphabet |
Like any inflected Indo-European language, the Russian language is studied by means of an analysis of the declension of nouns and adjectives and the conjugation of verbs, together with their use in conjunction with prepositions, connectives, etc. The first obstacle which the beginner encounters, however, is the problem of the alphabet. Once the alphabet has been learned, the study of Russian becomes relatively simple, certainly no more difficult than the study of German. The Russian, or Cyrillic, alphabet is an interesting combination of Roman, Greek, and Hebrew characters; following the Bolshevik Revolution, the orthography was revised and modernized, and, in the alphabet given in the following table, the older characters are listed for the convenience of those readers who must make occasional references to the pre-Revolution literature. Since the italicized alphabet is used in places of such critical interest as the statements of theorems, etc., many phrases and sentences are duplicated in italics in the grammatical sketch so that the reader will become accustomed to reading italicized printing.
No universal agreement has been reached on the transliteration of the Russian alphabet, and the most commonly used systems of transliteration are given in the following table. System I is that used by the Library of Congress and is the most commonly used system for nontechnical literature in the United States. System II is the system used in
The Alphabet
| PRINTED | SOUND | TRANSLITERATION | I | II | III | IV |
| А а | ah (f | a | a | a | a | |
| Б б | b ( | b | b | b | b | |
| В в | v ( | v | v | v | w | |
| Г г | g ( | g |
