Wiktionary:About Old East Slavic

Spelling normalization
Old East Slavic words were often written in a wide variety of spellings. This is a result of the phonological changes that were occuring at the time, in its evolution from its ancestral Common Slavic language. The main changes that took place during the Old East Slavic times are the merging of the nasal vowels and  into  and, and the changes to the "yer" vowels  and , which either disappeared or became  and. These changes resulted in inconsistent spellings where different letters were confused as the distinction between the sounds they represented disappeared in the spoken language.

In order to make things more consistent and easier to find, a standard normalisation is followed on Wiktionary. In general, the principle that is followed is "favour the older/more original forms", unless these forms are so old that they are rare even in the older texts.

Concerining spelling, the following practices are followed:
 * Use у instead of оу or ꙋ.
 * Use е instead of є, ѥ or э.
 * Use и instead of і.
 * Use ѧ instead of я or ѩ
 * Use ꙑ instead of ы.
 * Use з instead of ꙁ.

The following practices concerning phonology are followed:
 * Use ꙗ and ѧ as etymologically expected.
 * Use у and ѫ as etymologically expected.
 * Use ю and ѭ as etymologically expected.
 * Use ь and ъ for both weak and strong yers, rather than leaving them out or writing them as е and о.
 * Use и and ꙑ for tense yers (before an iotated vowel), rather than using yers or writing them as е and о.

Finally, proper nouns are written with a capital letter.

All other spellings are, of course, permitted as alternative spellings if attested. The normalised spelling doesn't need to be attested, as long as the word is attested in any spelling. For example, if both and  are attested, we would put the lemma at  even if that particular spelling variation is not attested. Most other dictionaries of old languages also work this way.

Pronunciation
Please use the template orv-IPA to generate Old East Slavic IPA pronunciations. The following vowel phonemes that are not usually designated in writing by separate characters have been added: It is not clear if all these phonemes were actually ever present together in one variety of Old East Slavic. It was however decided to give both these phonemes in one transcription, since their exact geographic distribution is unclear. The following table can be used as reference:
 * (often designated in literature as ): The reflex of a Proto-Slavic *o with an acute or neoacute accent. In most daughter languages this phoneme has merged with, except for a few primarily northern dialects, where it is still found as a separate phoneme.
 * (often designated in literature as : The reflex of a Proto-Slavic *o originally followed by a yer that was lost. This vowel later developed into the Ukrainian (cf., ).
 * : The reflex of a Proto-Slavic *e or *ě originally followed by a yer that was lost. This vowel later developed into the Ukrainian (cf., ).

Lemma forms
For adjectives, the short nominative singular should be taken as the citation form.

For nouns, the nominative singular (or, in the case of pluralia tantum, plural) should be taken as the citation form.

For verbs, the infinitive (ending in -(т)и) should be taken as the citation form.

Transliteration
Transliteration of Old East Slavic words into the Latin alphabet is handled automatically by Module:Cyrs-translit. This module is shared by Old Church Slavonic as the transliteration schemes are more or less identical between the two languages. The only real difference concerns the letter Щ: it is transliterated as šč in Old East Slavic words, while it is read as št in Old Chuch Slavonic.