This Cyrillic alphabet for a non-Slavic language was created by the 19th century monk Ajchrip (Айхрып) as an improvement of the Cyrillic spelling of his native language previously used by Russian missionaries. To make a long story short the misssionaries’ spelling revealed a thick Russian accent, failing to distinguish sounds which sounded alike to a Russian ear. It is to this day debated whether the missionaries could actually not hear the difference between the sounds in question, or if they were only at a loss how to spell them differently, in each case using the letter for the closest Russian phoneme.

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