still written with two letters. (In a 1968 study, long remains long in only half of the words in which it appears written, but long did so only a sixth of the time. The study, however, did not distinguish spelling from actual historical pronunciation, since it included loanwords in which consonants were written doubled but never pronounced long in Russian.) Effect of loanwords A number of the phonological features of Russian are attributable to the introduction of loanwords (especially from non-Slavic languages), including: Sequences of two vowels within a morpheme. Only a handful of such words, like 'spider' and 'slap in the face' are native. 'poet'. From French poète. 'mourning'. From German Trauer. Word-initial , except for the root эт-. 'era'. From German Ära Word-initial . (Proto-Slavic *a- > Russian ja-) 'avenue. From French avenue. 'swindle'. From French affaire. 'lamb'. From Church Slavonic The phoneme (see Ef (Cyrillic) for more information). 'phoneme'. From Greek φώνημα. 'ether'. From Greek αἰθήρ. 'fiasco'. From Italian fiasco. The occurrence of non-palatalized consonants before within roots. (The initial of a suffix or flexion invariably triggers palatalization of an immediately preceding consonant, as in / / .) The sequence within a morpheme. ) 'gin' from English. 'jazz' from English. Morphology and syntax Some of the morphological characteristics of Russian are: Loss of the vocative case Loss of the aorist and imperfect tenses (still preserved in Old Russian) Loss of the short adjective declensions except in the nominative Preservation of all Proto-Slavic participles See also History of the Slavic languages Russian language Old East Slavic language Russian alphabet Russian orthography Reforms of Russian orthography Russian phonology Russian grammar Russian etymology Russian Language Institute References Bibliography Paul Clemens and Elena Chapovalova, Les mots Russes par la racine (Essai de vocabulaire Russe contemporain par l'étymologie)- Alexander G. Preobrazhensky, , Columbia University Press, 1983 – Serguei Sakhno, Dictionnaire russe–français d'étymologie comparée: correspondences lexicales historiques – Kiparsky, Valentin, Russische Historische Grammatik, 3 vols., 1963, 1967, 1975. Max Vasmer: (Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 4 volumes, Heidelberg, 1950–58; Russian translation 1964–73). Terence Wade, Russian etymological dictionary, Duckworth Publishing, 1996 – External links