Category talk:Russian н-declension

The '-ен' before the case endings in the oblique cases is not the result of a nasal vowel having existed in OCS and Old East Slavic. It was in the reconstructed PIE roots of these words and was preserved in the oblique cases in modern Russian because, in intervocalic position, they didn't need to undergo reduction to a nasal vowel and, ultimately, to 'я'. There was no process in Russian by which nasal vowels became nasal diphthongs. Across the East Slavic branch of languages, nasal vowels further reduced to oral vowels, which is why elsewhere we don't see nasal consonants appearing where nasal vowels used to be. Epf1856 (talk) 18:14, 11 May 2018 (UTC)