I was taking a look at Russian and I was confused by some of the descriptions I read of the hard vs. soft difference in consonants, so I thought I'd ask.

Is soft the same as palatal -- the book I was reading said hard н vs. soft н was like French n vs. gn, but other sources describe the soft consonants as palatalized, so is soft н (in x-sampa) [J] or [n_j]? Is there even a difference? And same question with к, г, х, and л -- is the soft version of the first one [c] or [k_j]?

And the other thing, how big a difference is there between something like тя and тья? I understand that this is [t_ja] vs. [t_jja] but is this just a matter of having a "long" [j] sound, or is there are distinct difference between the two in terms of 1 vs. 2 consonants? (I don't know if that question's clear.)

modus.irrealis wrote:

I was taking a look at Russian and I was confused by some of the descriptions I read of the hard vs. soft difference in consonants, so I thought I'd ask.

Is soft the same as palatal -- the book I was reading said hard н vs. soft н was like French n vs. gn, but other sources describe the soft consonants as palatalized, so is soft н (in x-sampa) [J] or [n_j]? Is there even a difference? And same question with к, г, х, and л -- is the soft version of the first one [c] or [k_j]?

In books about Russian, "soft" is often used for "palatalised". And it's definitely [n_j], [k_j]. Unfortunately, descriptions of sounds in language textboks are often not scientific, but use approximations they think their readers understand. Quite often one also sees "palatal k (or t or b)" when what actually is meant is "palatalised".

modus.irrealis wrote:

And the other thing, how big a difference is there between something like тя and тья? I understand that this is [t_ja] vs. [t_jja] but is this just a matter of having a "long" [j] sound, or is there are distinct difference between the two in terms of 1 vs. 2 consonants? (I don't know if that question's clear.)

The difference is that in тья there is an audible [j] between [t_j] and [a] - at least in careful speech; in quick speech you won't be able to hear a difference.

Thanks.

For me, this is an aspect of Russian that's going to take lots of careful listening to my teacher and others, because for me, [J] and [n_j] sound the same, as far as I can tell at the moment, and because when some things are only noticeable in careful speech... It's hard.


_________________
Spanish/French/German/Russian

«Si el hombre supiera realmente el valor que tiene la mujer andaría a cuatro patas en su búsqueda.» - De parte de ni idea quién. Elije tu propio significado. Este ejemplo del uso de la coma me gusta.

Yeah, I tried listening to some online samples of Russian and my failure to figure anything out was the reason I had to bring my questions here. This is one aspect where dead languages have their advantages.

I'm not sure I have time to start learning anything about this language (although I do interact with native Russian speakers quite often, and I can't say that about many foreign languages), but anyway, I'll ask a few more questions.

The first is just to confirm what happens to unstressed vowels:

• у,ы,ю,и don't change too much except for becoming more open
  
• а,о are [a] in the syllable before the stress, and [@] elsewhere
  
• е,я become like и

And maybe not entirely a pronunciation-related question, but I was looking at the declension of nouns and I noticed that there was nom.sg. рука and nom.pl. руки, which doesn't fit either the hard or soft declension. The explanation in the book about these sorts of thing is spread all over the place and a little confusing but I gather that the reason is that the velars are outside of the hard vs. soft dichotomy, and so something like кя or кы is just not possible in Russian. Is that right?

modus.irrealis wrote:

The first is just to confirm what happens to unstressed vowels:

• у,ы,ю,и don't change too much except for becoming more open
  
• а,о are [a] in the syllable before the stress, and [@] elsewhere
  
• е,я become like и

Generally correct. Three remarks:
1) In slow language, the reductions are not as strong
2) Quite often, <а,о> are somewhere between [a] and [@] in the auslaut position; in the same position, <e> is sometimes pronounced [(j)@] in order to differentiate it from <i>, while <я> can be pronounced [(j)@] or [(j)a] (the purpose is to keep endings differentiated)
3) Russian dialects treat the reductions differently - you may have heard about okan'je (where /o/, /a/ are not reduced in unstressed syllables); other dialects have different reduction rules or different mergers - you don't have to know that actively, but you may encounter that in speech.

modus.irrealis wrote:

And maybe not entirely a pronunciation-related question, but I was looking at the declension of nouns and I noticed that there was nom.sg. рука and nom.pl. руки, which doesn't fit either the hard or soft declension. The explanation in the book about these sorts of thing is spread all over the place and a little confusing but I gather that the reason is that the velars are outside of the hard vs. soft dichotomy, and so something like кя or кы is just not possible in Russian. Is that right?

рука etc. belong to the hard declension; originally, the e.g. pl. was рукы. But ы was fronted after velars and became /i/, which then, in turn, palatalised the velars to /k'/, /g'/, /x'/ (don't remember exactly when that change happened - IIRC in the late medieval or Early Modern period. A similar development took place in Polish). So you have the following situation:

Old Russian: no velars before front vowels (as they had become palatal fricatives and affricates in the Proto-Slavic palatalisations)
Modern Russian: palatalised velars do exist before front vowels due to the shift <ы> > <и> and due to loan words like кино, кекс.

Structurally, though, for the purpose of choosing ending in paradigms, velar stems are counted as "hard", and endings like -ки -ги -хи are just variants of the hard paradigm.

And things like кя are not possible in originally Russian words, but are possible in loan words or geographical names like Кяхта (a Buryatian town).

Thanks for all the info. And now I have learned about akanye, okanye, ikanye, and the rest -- btw are these all normal terms or is Wikipedia going a little overboard?

modus.irrealis wrote:

Thanks for all the info. And now I have learned about akanye, okanye, ikanye, and the rest -- btw are these all normal terms or is Wikipedia going a little overboard?

No, these terms are all known among Russian linguists, dialectologists, and language teachers. There are also similar terms concerning other dialectal / regional pronounciation pecularities, e.g. tsokan'e for the merger of /t_C/ and /t_s/ into /t_s'/ in some northern dialects. The formation is always (specific sound) + -kan'e.
The term most widely known outside of language-interested circles is probably okan'e, as it is very conspicuous and typical for a large area (Northern Russia, parts of Siberia).

A quick question about the е in endings. It always implies softening of the previous consonant, right? For example, am I right in thinking that the dative of школа, школе has a soft л, even though the stem ends in a hard consonant?

Yes, 'schkole' has a soft l.

Thanks -- it wasn't the brightest of questions but sometimes you just have to make sure .

Two more questions popped up during my reading.

When is чτ pronounced as "sht"? Always or just in certain words? E.g. what is the pronunciation of чтобы?

Pretty much the same question for ого/его -- when is the г in those groups pronounced "v"? I know this is the pronunciation in certain genitive endings, but what about a word like много?

modus.irrealis wrote:

When is чτ pronounced as "sht"? Always or just in certain words?

<ч> is sometimes pronounced /S/ before a consonant; the following consonant need not always be <т> (cf. a word like конечно, where the <ч> is also pronounced /S/). However, AFAIK, this is still an irregularity and limited to a few words, the most important of these being конечно, что, and some derivatives of что.

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E.g. what is the pronunciation of чтобы?

Чтобы is a straightforward combination of что + бы, so the <ч> is pronounced as in что (ie. as /S/).

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Pretty much the same question for ого/его -- when is the г in those groups pronounced "v"? I know this is the pronunciation in certain genitive endings, but what about a word like много?

This is the pronunciation in those genitive endings (and the genitive form of the pronoun он, which is basically just a naked genitive ending: его), period. In all other situations, the combination is pronounced with /g/.

Xonen, thanks. That clears things up.

I had a couple more questions. First with those one-consonant prepositions, what happens when the following word begins with the same letter, for example with в восторге or с сыном, or even с завистью for that matter, where I believe the с is assimilated to the following з and is /z/? Is the consonant pronounced noticeably longer?

Is [r_j] humanly possible? I can do [r] just fine, but if I try to soften it, the trill comes to a stop, and I get [rj], or rather [rj:] because the [j] is to me extremely noticeable (unlike say the difference between [t_j] and [tj] which I have difficulties distinguishing). But soft р is a trill, right? Is this at least a difficult sound to get right, or am I doing something wrong?

modus.irrealis wrote:

I had a couple more questions. First with those one-consonant prepositions, what happens when the following word begins with the same letter, for example with в восторге or с сыном, or even с завистью for that matter, where I believe the с is assimilated to the following з and is /z/? Is the consonant pronounced noticeably longer?

Judge yourself - this rap has "в восторге" near the start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox8lgWFwIXI

I'm really bad at hearing these things, but personally, I pronounce the consonant somewhat longer in such instances - that's what I was taught at university, by trained native speaker linguists . In very careful speech, e.g. when dictating, you may even hear a slight schwa after the first consonant

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Is [r_j] humanly possible? I can do [r] just fine, but if I try to soften it, the trill comes to a stop, and I get [rj], or rather [rj:] because the [j] is to me extremely noticeable (unlike say the difference between [t_j] and [tj] which I have difficulties distinguishing). But soft р is a trill, right? Is this at least a difficult sound to get right, or am I doing something wrong?

As you probably will have guessed, my advice is not to obsess about the slight difference between [r_j] and [rj]. Anyway, when I pronounce [r_j], the onset is [r], and then I move the tip of the tongue to the palate for an instant before moving on to the next sound. So I certainly don't coarticulate [r] and the palatal element all the time and I also don't keep the tip of the tongue near the palate long enough to get a full-blown [j].

I got my hands on the Pimsleur Russian series and I have a whole lot of pronunciation questions:

First consonants. I noticed that щ is pronounced as what I assume is [ɕɕ]/[s/:] -- is this the normal pronunciation, i.e., the one used by most people? And then with зж I would guess after reading Wikipedia's Russian Phonology article that this is [ʑʑ]/[z/:]. Is that right?

I'll never get this palatalization thing. I can't hear any difference between hard and soft г. At first I assumed velars would be easy but then I realized I was thinking of and pronouncing soft г as [ɟ]/[J/], but that's very different from what I hear on the CD. I guess this isn't so much a question as a random complaint.

Is soft л palatalized? I just hear it as regular "clear" [l], like I'd hear in Greek or French. But again I suspect that I keep expecting palatalized to mean palatal with some of these consonants and my ear simply can't hear mere palatalization.

On to vowels. Do stressed final vowels do strange things? I hear some strange diphthongs when people say вы, хорошо.

I know that back vowels can be fronted between soft consonants but how far to the front do they go? I keep hearing еще as something like [jœɕɕ*]/[j9s/:*] (* represents some crazy diphthong) and it was a word I knew from before but did not recognize.

What does unstressed и/е become? I'm thinking it's supposed to be [ɪ]/[I] but the speakers don't seem to consistently say that. Is my hearing off or (which seems natural) do unstressed vowels cover a wide range of sounds depending on context?



Last edited by modus.irrealis on Thu Oct 09, 2008 2:03 pm; edited 4 times in total

modus.irrealis wrote:

I got my hands on the Pimsleur Russian series and I have a whole lot of pronunciation questions:

I assume you use IPA to indicate the pronunciation? I only get a load of squares, so it'd be better to use X-Sampa if you'd like me to comment.

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First consonants. I noticed that щ is pronounced as what I assume is [ɕɕ] -- is this the normal pronunciation, i.e., the one used by most people? And then with зж I would guess after reading Wikipedia's Russian Phonology article that this is [ʑʑ]. Is that right?

I get squares here; what it ought to be is something like [C:] for щ and [j-:]* for зж.

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Is soft л palatalized? I just hear it as regular "clear" [l], like I'd hear in Greek or French. But again I suspect that I keep expecting palatalized to mean palatal with some of these consonants and my ear simply can't hear mere palatalization.

Depending on the speaker, you can get anything between [l_j] and a simple "clear" [l] for soft л. There's a reason why "l" in loans from Western European languages normally is trancribed as ль. The soft-hard contrast works as exactly that, a contrast, and the difference to the hard (=dark, back) л is big enough for them not to become mixed up.

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On to vowels. Do stressed final vowels do strange things? I hear some strange diphthongs when people say вы, хорошо.

Both stressed ы and o are often pronounced with a labial, w-like onset, which is especially audible after labial consonants, making them sound like rising diphthongs. Is it that what you hear?

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I know that back vowels can be fronted between soft consonants but how far to the front do they go? I keep hearing еще as something like [jœɕɕ*] (* represents some crazy diphthong) and it was a word I knew from before but did not recognize.

I can't read the squares, but the [jœ] onset looks strange to me - everyone I know has someting like [jIC:'o].

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What does unstressed и/е become? I'm thinking it's supposed to be [ɪ] but the speakers don't seem to consistently say that. Is my hearing off or (which seems natural) do unstressed vowels cover a wide range of sounds depending on context?

For и, you normally get [i] or [I], rarely [@] or [@-]*; for e, you can get the same as well (with [@] [@-] being more frequent - although generally", и/е aren't distinguished in unaccented position, people still frequently try to maintain a distinction, especially in endings, so you also get to hear "shortened" [e] [E] for unstressed e.

* "-" stands for the reverse solidus, which for whatever reasons displays in the "preview", but not in the posted text.

hwhatting wrote:

I assume you use IPA to indicate the pronunciation? I only get a load of squares, so it'd be better to use X-Sampa if you'd like me to comment.

I edited my message, using a forward slash for the backslash, but I think you answered most of my questions anyway.

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I get squares here; what it ought to be is something like [C:] for щ and [j-:]* for зж.

I was basing my transcription on the Wikipedia article -- but what I hear has a more sibilant flavour than [C] and [j/].

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Depending on the speaker, you can get anything between [l_j] and a simple "clear" [l] for soft л. There's a reason why "l" in loans from Western European languages normally is trancribed as ль. The soft-hard contrast works as exactly that, a contrast, and the difference to the hard (=dark, back) л is big enough for them not to become mixed up.

Alright, makes sense.

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Both stressed ы and o are often pronounced with a labial, w-like onset, which is especially audible after labial consonants, making them sound like rising diphthongs. Is it that what you hear?

The thing that I noticed most was at the end of the vowel, ы sounded like [1I], and I at first thought they were saying хорошое because it sounded like [O@] (but it's in the context Как вы поживаете? Хорошо спасибо.). It's hard to get sounds across like this so I'll see if I can try to get in on my computer.

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I can't read the squares, but the [jœ] onset looks strange to me - everyone I know has someting like [jIC:'o].

I chose the wrong word for that example, I wanted a work with о between two soft consonants, but I can't remember an example of a word I heard but does the о here get fronted all the way to [9]? For еще the problem was that the first vowel came across as rounded which I found odd but maybe I need to take another listen.

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For и, you normally get [i] or [I], rarely [@] or [@-]*; for e, you can get the same as well (with [@] [@-] being more frequent - although generally", и/е aren't distinguished in unaccented position, people still frequently try to maintain a distinction, especially in endings, so you also get to hear "shortened" [e] [E] for unstressed e.

Okay, thanks.

modus.irrealis wrote:

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I get squares here; what it ought to be is something like [C:] for щ and [j-:]* for зж.

I was basing my transcription on the Wikipedia article -- but what I hear has a more sibilant flavour than [C] and [j/].

Actually, your [s/] and [z/] fit the bill better than my [C:] for щ and [j/:] for зж; I didn't see them in my X-Sampa table when I did my post, because they're not in the overview that is sorted by places of articulation, but only in a table of additional symbols.

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Both stressed ы and o are often pronounced with a labial, w-like onset, which is especially audible after labial consonants, making them sound like rising diphthongs. Is it that what you hear?

The thing that I noticed most was at the end of the vowel, ы sounded like [1I], and I at first thought they were saying хорошое because it sounded like [O@] (but it's in the context Как вы поживаете? Хорошо спасибо.). It's hard to get sounds across like this so I'll see if I can try to get in on my computer.

If you can do so, it would be interesting. It could be simply that the unrounding that takes place in transition from the [o] of хорошо to the [s] of спасибо sets in already during the realisation of the [o] when saying Хорошо спасибо quickly; I noticed that effect when repeating your example. It's not a normal feature of the articulation of stressed [o] or of the pronunciation of хорошо.

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I can't read the squares, but the [jœ] onset looks strange to me - everyone I know has someting like [jIC:'o].

I chose the wrong word for that example, I wanted a work with о between two soft consonants, but I can't remember an example of a word I heard but does the о here get fronted all the way to [9]? For еще the problem was that the first vowel came across as rounded which I found odd but maybe I need to take another listen.

French œ or German ö are normally transcribed as ё, so there's a certain affinity, but to my ears, [o] in {K'oK'} is somewhere in between [3/] and [o]. See the pronunciation of the words тёти, живёте in this song (from a film that traditionally is shown on every New Year's Eve): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plhuFzMDN-U