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From: "Vladimir Menkov" <vmenkov@cs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: Russian vowel  bI
Message-ID: <1995Mar29.145311.11345@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Computer Science, Indiana University
References: <3kcq7c$167k@news.ccit.arizona.edu> <D5zCBv.64F@eskimo.com> <3l6q06$bul@news.ycc.yale.edu> <D64nFE.IKG@eskimo.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 14:53:04 -0500
Lines: 52

In article <D64nFE.IKG@eskimo.com>, Richard Wojcik <rickw@eskimo.com> wrote:
>I used to believe that they 
(/y/ and /i/)
>were the same phoneme in modern literary Russian, but,
>after debating Alexis Manaster-Ramer on the point a few years ago, I changed
>my mind.  He pointed out the existence of Siberian (I believe) place
>names that began with the "yerih" letter and were pronounced as such. 

Well, Russian maps shows a few such placenames, but none of them is in
an area that has been traditionally populated by Russian speakers;
none is considered a Russian word. The index to a world atlas I have
lists some 70,000 place names. Fourteen (14) of them start with the
letter "Y" ("yerih"). They refer to objects in Yakutia (Saha),
Kazakhstan, Turkey, Estonia, Romania, Ethiopia, and a few other
regions whose language contains a sound that the map makers (or some
kind of "Commission for Transliteration of Geographical Names") have
chosen to transcribe as "yerih".

So in my opinion this argument, per se, is not more convincing than
the presence of S~ao Paulo on US-printed maps is an argument in favor
of "phonemicity" of the respective nasalized (?) vowel in English.

> What
>really convinced me though was his point that "yerih" was no longer commonly
>referred to by that name.  Rather, Russians now tend to simply use the /i/
>and /y/ sounds as names for the letters.  That's as nice a minimal pair as
>you can get.  

I think the reason for the change of the name was mainly political.
As Lev Uspenski (a Russian journalist) says, in the 1900's and 1910's,
new-fashioned independent secular schools opted in favor of abandoning
traditional letter names (Az, Buki, Vedi, Glagol, ..., Izhe, ....,
Jerih, ...) and replacing them with short German-style "phonetic"
names (A, Be, Ve, Ga, ..., I, ..., Y, ...). After the revolution the
new names were used by the state schools; as all other schools were
closed, the old names came into disuse.

I agree that the fact that every schoolchild now is supposed to
pronounce an "isolated Y" at least once in his career certainly
increases it's claim to being a phoneme.

But what would you say if, say, Australia declared itself a republic,
and to celebrate the beginning of the new age of freedom, made the
yogh an English letter, with the name "zhee", to be used in words like
garage ("gara3"), "rouge" ("roo3") and "pleasure" ("ple33er"). Would
that make "zh" a phoneme of (Australian) English?

	--Vladimir "Collecting signatures under the petition to
	be submitted to Florida Legislature to make ~n an English 
	phoneme" Me~nkov


