"These girls are sisters."
Translation:Эти девочки — сёстры.
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The Three Spelling rules (I do not expect anyone to memorize that, though)
There are some phonological constraints. If a noun ends in к/г/х or in ш/ж/щ/ч , only И is possible. Actually, it goes all the way to the core of the system: if you make ANY form of any word, and an Ы should follow one of these consonants, you use И instead.
If you are interested how come it works like that, it is due to the historical development of modern Russian
- ш, ж, ч (and щ, which was шч) used to be soft consonants, so И is a historical spelling
- ки, ги, хи actually come from old кы, гы, хы
- the old ки, ги, хи turned into чи, жи, ши, AFAIK
- so, кы, гы and хы have nowhere to come from. When using native Russian words, they only appear at word boundaries («мальчик и девочка»)
TL;DR stress happens to move in сестра. In Russian, stressed Е (historically) turned into Ё (but not everywhere)
- The stress of words may move depending on their form (the number of patterns is thankfully finite). Сестра is ending-stressed in the singular. In the plural, however, the initial syllable is stressed in all forms except the Genitive (сестёр).
- At some point over five hundred years ago stressed Е became Ё if a non-palatalised consonant followed it (e.g., Петр → Пётр, мед → мёд, меч → меч, день → день).
- So сестры, with a stress on the first е, becomes сёстры.
- It is messed up in the modern language. First, ш, ж, ц used to be palatalised but now are not. Ц was late to the party, so е remains unchanged if followed by ц (e.g., конец, отец). Second, Е is not the only Е. Russian also had a different vowel, something like /ɪe/ or /eː/ (spelt Ѣ). It merged with Е for the vast majority of dialects, but only a few centuries ago.
- So do not try to guess if you encounter an unfamiliar word. For words you know, though, either it turns into ё or it does not, in all forms that have the right stress (e.g., стена́→сте́ны, жена́→жёны)
Who knows? I would rather omit it in informal messaging in such a simple sentence. I tried my best to stick to standard punctuation in all my sentences and all other people's sentences that I had time to check. Still, I am not a writer, so in real life I get the commas and dashes mostly correct but definitely not 100% of the time.
Note that if one of these is a pronoun (not a noun!) or if you have a negation (let alone a question) rather than a declarative statement, no dash is required. Questions will almost never use it even for the sake of emphasis.