¹ In the illustrative examples, a dot separates the constituent parts of the verb form (prefix, stem, predesinential, final). The transcription used here is morphophonemic rather than phonemic; vowels are written in their ‘full’ form, but the actual phonemic value of such symbols as -e- and -o- in unstressed syllables can easily be inferred from the vowel table given above. Where a given verb is defective, the missing forms are supplied from a compound of the same verb.

² The symbol J in this predesinential represents the following alternations:

pj, bj, mj, fj, vj ~ plj, blj, mlj, flj, vlj: ljublj.ú ~ ljúbj.i.t ‘I love’ ~ ‘he loves‘

dj, zj ~ ž: vož.ú ~ vódj.i.t ‘I lead’ ~ ‘he leads‘

sj ~ š: proš.ú ~ prósj.i.t ‘I ask’ ~ ‘he asks‘

tj ~ č: vjinč.ú ~ vjintj.í.t ‘I screw’ ~ ‘he screws‘

stj ~ šč: číšc.u ~ čístj.i.t ‘I clean’ ~ ‘he cleans‘

zdj ~ žj: yéžj.u ~ yézdj.i.t ‘I travel’ ~ ‘he travels‘

Other alternations, such as tj ~ šč, are treated as irregularities.

³ Throughout this paper, forms are written with ‘full’ vowels (cf. fn. 1); thus njos.ú ‘I carry’ is phonemically /njisú/, and govorj.ú ‘I talk’ is /gavarjú/. We know the values in these cases from related forms, such as njós ‘he carried’, góvor ‘dialect’, razgovór ‘conversation’. This applies also to the writing of the predesinential of the first conjugation, where we write e.g. čitáy.o.t ‘he reads’, phonemically /čitáyit/. In some ambiguous cases we have arbitrarily assumed a full vowel, as in /bjirú/, written bjor.ú ‘I take’.

⁴ The symbol q in this predesinential indicates that a preceding plain consonant is replaced by its palatalized counterpart, and that k and g are replaced by č and ž respectively: njos.ú ~ njosj.ó.t ‘I carry’ ~ ‘he carries’; pjok.ú ~ pjoč.ó.t ‘I bake’ ~ ‘he bakes’; mog.ú ~ móž.o.t ‘I can’ ~ ‘he can’.

⁵ The P3 predesinential -á- is replaced by -u- when unstressed: govorj.á.t ‘they talk’, but ljúbj.u.t ‘they like’.

⁶ The regular ending of the infinitive is -tj. When it is stressed, the ending appears as -tjí (njos.tjí 'to carry'); a few verbs with a final guttural in the infinitive stem have the ending -č (pjéč 'to bake', stem pjok-).

⁷ The past has different forms for masculine, feminine, and neuter singulars, and for plural (without distinction of gender): čitá.l, fem. čitá.la, neut. čitá.lo, plur. čitá.lji.

⁸ We leave the treatment of other irregularities for another place.

⁹ For the older period I rely on the excellent treatment by W. Guihomard, Des systèmes traditionnels de classement des verbes russes, Mélanges publiés en l'honneur de M. Paul Boyer 324–33 (Paris, 1925).

¹⁰ Karl H. Meyer, Historische Grammatik der russischen Sprache (Bonn, 1923).

¹¹ Erich Berneker, Russische Grammatik (Leipzig, 1897).

¹² The infinitive stem here usually ends in -e-, but in -a- after č, š, ž, and y.

¹³ Serge Karcevski, Études sur le système verbal du russe contemporain, Slavia 1.242–68 (Prague, 1922). Excellent adaptations of Karcevski's classification appear in Vinogradoff, Sovremennyj russkij yazyk 2.351–9 (Moskva, 1938), and Whitfield, A Russian reference grammar (Cambridge, 1944).

¹⁴ Published in two books prepared under the auspices of the U. S. Armed Forces Institute : Dictionary of spoken Russian 230–3 (War Department TM 30–944, 1945); Spoken Russian 2.629–36 (War Department EM 525, 1945).

¹⁵ Some verbs in this list are shown in the reflexive form. The reflexive suffix, added to certain verbs in various meanings, has the following shapes: -s after vowels (uč.ú.s ‘I study’, uč.í.tji.s 'you study'), -sa after consonants other than t or tj (úč.i.m.sa 'we study'), -ca after t and tj, the latter being replaced before this suffix by t (úč.i.t.ca 'he studies', uč.í.t.ca 'to study'). Some verbs occur only in the reflexive form, e.g. ošibáy.u.s 'I am mistaken'.

¹⁶ The present stem has an inserted vowel.

¹⁷ The infinitive is irregular.

¹⁸ The replacement of the stem-final consonant before the phoneme tj of the infinitive ending is indicated before each subgroup of verbs within this class. The symbols BB, BA, BC, AA, etc. refer to the accent of the present and of the past respectively.