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Cyrillic pronunciation | ||
Tags: Cyrillic | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6263 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 8 20 August 2010 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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There's a guy that comes into my office a few times a week that I've been starting to become friends with, but this morning, I noticed that he had a little "Ukrainian Youth League" or something like that emblem on his shirt, so I asked if his family was from there. It turns out that it is and, even though he speaks accentless English, he speaks Ukrainian still at home (his parents moved from the Ukrain to the States).
Anyway, I was thinking I might learn just a few phrases in Ukrainian to pull out the next time he comes by. I found out that it's one of the Slavic languages, that uses a Cryllic alphabet. I know I can go one of two routes: 1) Learn to read Cryllic, then memorize a phrase or two or 2) Learn from a phonetic Roman approximation #2 is obviously the easier route, but I was wondering, for future reference, is Cryllic an alphabet where certain symbols are equated with sounds? Like across the many Cryllic-alphabet languages, if I learned pronunciation of the Cryllic letters, could I read-without-understanding-but-making-the-right-sounds with any of them? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| arturs Triglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 5276 days ago 278 posts - 408 votes Speaks: Latvian*, Russian, English | Message 2 of 8 20 August 2010 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's better to start with learning some of the Cyrillic alphabet and use the Romanization along, by learning the phrases.
Practically every letter in the alphabet has it's own sound and usually it is quite simple, like me, for example, I speak Russian and understand what is written in Russian, but I can read Ukranian text almost as close as a native speaker, though I don't understand a word what I'm reading. But there are always some exceptions, like the letter "О" in many Russian words is pronounced as "A" and "O" at the same time, like "молоко" is pronounced "malako". So it means that not always the letter represents one sound like in the "O" case. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eumiro Bilingual Octoglot Groupie Germany Joined 5279 days ago 74 posts - 102 votes Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, French, English, German, Polish, Spanish, Russian Studies: Italian, Hungarian | Message 3 of 8 20 August 2010 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Russian pronunciation is not 100% regular (no idea about the Ukrainian). There are not only these a/o issues (unaccentuated 'o' will be read as 'a'), but there are letters, that won't be read at all. For example in 'пожалуйста' the '-уй-' is not read. Or the '-т-' in грустный.
It is just like with the latin alphabet. You know all letters in a written word, but in different languages the word will be read otherwise. Every letter may be read differently. Oh, by the way, in English you read every character differently according to its position in the word, and even there is no 100% regularity ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5325 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 4 of 8 20 August 2010 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Even if you don't intend to study Russian it couldn't hurt to learn the alphabet, which is definitely manageable. Check out this site.
Take for example the following word: АМЕРИКА = America For example, once you figure out that the the Russian "Р" is the Latin "R" and the Russian "И" is the Latin "I" you should be able to read the following words: мотор (МОТОР) метро (МЕТРО) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aru-aru Triglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 6462 days ago 244 posts - 331 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, Russian | Message 5 of 8 20 August 2010 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cryllic is not difficult, learn it. One afternoon of intensive study will be enough. To learn phrases you'd better go with audio anyway, so looking for text in Roman letters will not be necessary.
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| Cherepaha Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6594 days ago 126 posts - 175 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Polish, Latin, French | Message 6 of 8 22 September 2010 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | ||
Pronunciation of "a" in place of unstressed "o" is a characteristic of dialectal speech labeled "akanye". It is characteristic of Russian literary language and Belorussian. Ukrainian, however, pronounces "o" as [o] in unstressed positions. That is called "okanye" and is also characteristic of a number or Russian language dialects. Whether you pronounce an "o" as an [o] or as an [a] you will be understood by the native Russian and Ukrainian speakers. As for the unpronounceable consonants. The list of words in which it happens is very small. In Russian language it occurs most often in words that have a cluster of consonants positioned together, so that one of them gets omitted in pronunciation for the ease of utterance. Once again, you will be clearly understood if you pronounce every single letter. In other words, to answer the original question, Cyrillic alphabet presents an imperfect (i.e. with a few exceptions), yet a match between the letters that are written and sounds that are pronounced. I'd seen foreigners come to Russia having only learned Cyrillic alphabet. They would fluently read out Cyrillic texts without any understanding of the meaning, thus making everyone around them gasp at how well they read and presumably speak the language :). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TheBB Pentaglot Newbie Switzerland sam.math.ethz.ch/~efRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5247 days ago 9 posts - 23 votes Speaks: Danish, Norwegian*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Swiss-German | Message 7 of 8 22 September 2010 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, with some exceptions (Г is a G, but sometimes pronounced like V). The most crucial problem is that you need to know where the stress point is. Some vowels (О and А the most glaring examples, Е and Я others) are reduced when not stressed. There is basically no rule to tell where the stress is unless someone shows you :(. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5408 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 8 of 8 24 September 2010 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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South Slavic languages that use Cyrillic, which are Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian, are almost completely phonetic, i.e. one letter for a sound and one sound for a letter. Serbs are actually very proud of having such a strict phonetic orthography.
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