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  • Do you really mean to write совет with an accent? That Latin character may be used by OED, but it doesn't seem to appear in Cyrillic (which may be why it can't be rendered well). Commented Jan 27, 2019 at 23:08
  • @JEL: My understanding is that in Cyrillic, the acute accent is used (optionally, not obligatorily) to indicate the position of the stress in a word. I don't think it is related to the pronunciation of the preceding consonant letter. Commented Jan 28, 2019 at 2:07
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    @JEL: What I'm saying is that I don't think the acute accent has to do with the presence or absence of a "y" sound (Russian speakers don't hear "ye" as in "yet" in this word, although English speakers do; to a Russian speaker, it's about the "v" being "soft" or "hard"). It's just indicating that the first syllable is unstressed, and the second syllable is stressed, like in the English word "respéct". English speakers don't follow the Russian stress pattern. Commented Jan 28, 2019 at 2:25
  • Thanks a lot! 1) Re: the Obrenović's proclamation, it's clear that the word being transcribed is the same Serbo-Croatian Slavonicism sovjet which I discussed in my own hypothesis. I assume that it's not only spelled, but also pronounced with [je]. 2) I actually found a similar 1847 attestation of "Sowiet" in a translated 1829 work about the Serbian Revolution written by the famous L. von Ranke (in German he wrote Sowjet just as now) before but discarded it. 3) After your hint I was able to find 5 more attestations of "sovyet" from the 19th c. in GB, both in Russian and Servian contexts. Commented Jan 28, 2019 at 14:25
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    @ain92, I got little for 'sovet': 54,331 matches, 1748-2018; all except a surname false positives through 1859. In 1905, a spike of 247 hits (compare to 628 for 'soviet', but these raw numbers misrepresent the frequency, because 'soviet' produces many more false positives than 'sovet') represents primarily widely reprinted syndicated articles (June-July) wherein "Sovet" is paired with "Gosudarstvennaia", and the pair then frequently translated as "Present Council of the Empire". Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 18:10