Slavic vocabulary

The following list is a comparison of basic Proto-Slavic vocabulary and the corresponding reflexes in the modern languages, for assistance in understanding the discussion in Proto-Slavic and History of the Slavic languages. The word list is based on the Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist Morris Swadesh, a tool to study the evolution of languages via comparison, containing a set of 207 basic words which can be found in every language and are rarely borrowed. However, the words given as the modern versions are "not" necessarily the normal words with the given meaning in the various modern languages, but the words directly descended from the corresponding Proto-Slavic word (the "reflex"). The list here is given both in the orthography of each language, with accent marks added as necessary to aid in pronunciation and Proto-Slavic reconstruction. See below for a capsule summary of how to pronounce each language, as well as some discussion of the conventions used.
Transcription of Russian and Bulgarian.
Transcription of Bulgarian follows the standard conventions for academic transliteration of Cyrillic, with the exception that Cyrillic ъ is represented as "ǝ" instead of "ă" for ease of reading, particularly when combined with a stress mark ("ǝ́" instead of "ắ"). This is a one-to-one transliteration that directly represents the spelling of Cyrillic. This transliteration also represents Bulgarian phonology quite well (unlike the situation in Russian).
Transcription of Russian is based on the same standard, but deviates from it in order to consistently represent palatalization (always written with a following apostrophe, e.g. "l', n', t', v"') and the phoneme /j/ (always written "j"), both of which are spelled in multiple ways in Cyrillic. The following indicates how to convert between the two:
The result is that this article's transcription is almost directly phonemic, making it significantly easier for readers not familiar with the complications of Cyrillic spelling. Note that the transcription used here continues the standard practice of representing the Cyrillic letters ы и as "y i", although they are normally considered allophones of each other. This is because the pronunciation of the two letters is significantly different, and Russian ы normally continues Common Slavic *y , which was a separate phoneme.
The letter щ is conventionally written "št" in Bulgarian, "šč" in Russian. This article writes "šš"' in Russian to reflect the modern pronunciation .
Both transcriptions indicate stress with an acute accent (á é í ó ú ý ǝ́). Stress is indicated in Cyrillic in the same fashion, except with the letter ё, which is always stressed.
Pronunciation.
Capsule summary of Russian pronunciation.
The transcription used in this article is morphophonemic rather than strictly phonemic, i.e. it writes the underlying phonemes rather than the phonemes actually heard when pronounced. The difference occurs particularly in the representation of unstressed vowels, where multiple underlying phonemes merge. For example, underlying "e" and "i" merge into the same sound when unstressed, but the difference is revealed in related forms based on the same root: e.g. "z'eml'á" "land" has accusative "z'éml'u" , but "z'imá" "winter" has accusative "z'ímu" . When the transcription (which is derived from the spelling) disagrees with the actual morphophonemic pronunciation, the latter is indicated specially, e.g. čto /što/; š'it' /šyt'/; ž'óltyj /žóltyj/; ž'ená /žená/ ; sólnc'e /sónce/ . This occurs mostly with the letters "š, ž, c", which are normally written palatal but pronounced non-palatal; but it is also due to occasional assimilations. Note that the rules for unstressed vowels still need to be applied (see below).
Dialectal differentiation.
After the three palatalizations of Proto-Slavic, dialectal variation became more apparent. Some dialects (such as Proto-East Slavic), applied the second regressive palatalization across an intervening *v. 
Also, the realization of the palatalizations' sibilants varied a little amongst dialects. argues that the phonetic character of the palatalizations was uniform throughout Common Slavic and that West Slavic languages developed *š later on by analogy. In all dialects (except for Lechitic), was deaffricated to :
The final cutoff point for the Proto-Slavic period was the change of *ě to *a after palatal consonants and *j, which then created *ča/*ka contrasts. This, and the shortening and elision of weak yers (*ь/ĭ and *ъ/ŭ) (see Havlík's law) that created newly formed closed syllables ended the period of syllabic synharmony characteristic of Common Slavic.
For many Common Slavic dialects—including most of West Slavic, all but the northernmost portions of East Slavic, and some western parts of South Slavic— *g lenited from a voiced velar plosive to a voiced velar fricative ( > ). Because this change was not universal and because it did not occur in a number of East Slavic dialects (such as Belarusian and South Russian) until after the application of Havlík's law, calls into question early projections of this change and postulates three independent instigations of lenition, dating the earliest to before 900 AD and the latest to the early thirteenth century.
Because the reflexes for the nasal vowels *ę and *ǫ differ so widely, it's very likely that their phonetic value in Late Proto-Slavic was not uniform.