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Certain Aspects of Russian Pronunciation | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4465 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 16 26 September 2012 at 7:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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I plan on reviewing pronunciation, and will post little things that I've found helpful this time around. Feel free to post
pronunciation points that you find interesting or useful. 1) Here's a quote from Princeton: "It is very important that you don’t think of, say, бя as ‘б plus soft {A}’. It's actually ‘soft бь plus basic {A}’. (This may seem a bit backwards, but it’s really the way things are.) Once you have become accustomed to this notion, you will have conquered a major aspect in the workings of the Russian sound system." I've seen this in other places too, but haven't seen an explanation of why it's important. Basically, if you pronounce a word like самолёт (airplane) as самол + ёт instead of само + лёт, you will sound bad to a Russian ear. I use this example because this is one that I can actually hear a tiny difference. So I'm trying to remember to keep the softness attached to the consonant, even if I can't tell the difference myself. But I'm not ready to go as far as some text books tell me to. I don't look at б and think "there are 2 possible pronunciations for that consonant". I'm not saying I won't do it at some point in the future, but I just haven't encountered a reason for doing it yet. To me, it just б, and I'll pronounce it depending on context. I think this two- pronunciation thing is responsible for the confusion regarding transliteration of щ. I don't know why there are both ш and щ. They have the same basic sound. There are no other consonants that share the same basic sound. But in this case there is a separate consonant for hard (ш) and soft (щ). So the text books, trying to get us to think of separate consonant sounds with built in hardness and softness, feel it's necessary to transliterate separate sounds for the two consonants. Anyway, it gets confusing to me, so I prefer to think of them as "sh" and pronounce them depending on context. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4286 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 16 26 September 2012 at 8:55am | IP Logged | |||||
My decades ago high school Russian taught me the opposite if I am remembering rightly, i.e. that ш is softer and щ harder. That ш is pronounced like English "sh" and щ like "shch", as if two consonantal sounds are in one. They never sounded the same to me once I could discriminate them. However I don't remember being exposed to fast native speech, so maybe in that it gets blurred a little. Doubtless one of the native speakers like Serpent can give a more authoritative posting on this. Also, it never hurts to go back to basics like this once you get on a ways in learning. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4566 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 3 of 16 26 September 2012 at 9:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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There are a few cases where this distinction forms minimal pairs. A well known example is the pair of words съел ('с plus soft {Е}') vs. сел ('soft сь plus basic {Е}'). Here mispronunciation could lead to actual confusion, so the distinction is important. And this isn't exclusive to cases involving ъ. I remember someone on Lang-8 asking why the word друзья needed the letter ь if the я already made the з soft. In this case ь plays two roles - softening and separating, making it a case of 'soft зь plus soft {Я}', which forms a minimal pair with Друзя, the masculine genitive of a rare but famous surname.
As for щ, the reason why this letter exists and is transliterated as 'shch' is that it actually used to be pronounced like that, rather than as a soft variant of ш. That is how it is still pronounced in Ukrainian, and the consonant cluster itself is also preserved in Polish as 'szcz'. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4566 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 4 of 16 26 September 2012 at 9:34am | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by vonPeterhof on 26 September 2012 at 9:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6703 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 16 26 September 2012 at 10:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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All this shch/sjtj (the Swedish version) is just confusing, as if the sound is a cluster similar to (har)SH+CH(urch), and I've never heard any Russian nor non-native Russian teacher say that sound.
According to IPA (if that matters), the [ʂ] and [ɕ] match Mandarin pinyin sh and x, and that's strikingly similar to what I've perceived - and for me, that's about the best explanation so far. Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 26 September 2012 at 12:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4286 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 16 26 September 2012 at 11:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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@vonPeterhof,
Thank you for the detailed explanations. My high school teacher was non-native and I also may be remembering wrong. We had no audio component that I remember and depended on him for pronouncing everything. @jeff, Thanks too for that comparison with Mandarin. Having studied that as well many years ago, that differentiation makes it easier for me to get the proper Russian pronunciation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4850 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 7 of 16 26 September 2012 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Russian has phonemic distinction between a soft consonant and a consonant + /j/.
Therefore бя /bʲа/ is not бья /bja/. the difference is obvious for native Russian speakers but is hard to perceive by speakers of many other languages. In unstressed syllables /j/ might be lost, but it can't appear where there is no such sound. The difference is reflected in spelling, pronunciation, grammar, meaning - everywhere. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4465 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 16 29 September 2012 at 5:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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2) Regarding ъ. I've seen it described as a pause, but I can't get words to sound right if I use what I think is a pause.
So I tried to use some examples to model my ъ after. I put them in my text-to-speech program, and listened. There aren't many words to work with, but I'll used two of the most common ones as examples. съесть (to eat) - here the ъ sounds like ы; maybe slightly shortened объясни́ть (to explain) - there are lots of these бъя combinations, where the я is unstressed. In this situation, the ъя sounds like ии I'm probably wrong here, but fortunately, there aren't many words for me to mess up, and this is the best I've come up with so far. Open to suggestions. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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