Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!Germany.EU.net!EU.net!uunet!eskimo!rickw
From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: languages with phonetic alphabets?
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: eskimo.com
Message-ID: <D62nrq.G1I@eskimo.com>
Sender: usenet@eskimo.com (News User Id)
Organization: Eskimo North (206) For-Ever
References: <3kv7jk$61e@news1.delphi.com> <planders.578.2F732A45@mail.utexas.edu>
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 1995 23:55:01 GMT
Lines: 43

In article <planders.578.2F732A45@mail.utexas.edu>,
Preston Landers <planders@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
>In article <3kv7jk$61e@news1.delphi.com> tmoran@bix.com writes:
>
>>My son asked if there are any languages where each letter of the
>>alphabet has a single pronunciation.  Are there?
>
>Russian is pretty close to that.  Within a single dialect of Russian, there 
>is pretty much only one way to pronounce each letter, and also each sound in 
>the language is represented by a single letter with a few exceptions.

Russian differs from English in that the spelling is can be linked to
phonemes in a more predictable and consistent fashion, but there is very
little one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and letters of the
alphabet.  Just for starters, there is a complete mismatch between vowels
and consonants.  Russian has only 6 vowel phonemes--i,y,u,e,o,a (5 if you
count [i] and [y] as a single phoneme), but it has 10 vowel letters
(transliterated):  "a", "je", "jo", "i", "o", "u", "y", "e", "ju", "ja".
Historically, front vowels--[i], [e], [ae]--caused preceding vowels to
palatalize.  In modern Russian, the palatalized and nonpalatalized
consonants are phonemically distinct, and they affect the articulation of
surrounding vowels.  (E.g., the word "five"--/p'at'/--is actually
pronounced with a fronted [ae] sound.)  Cyrillic consonants, reflecting an
earlier phonemic pattern, simply fail to correspond to the
palatalized/nonpalatalized dichotomy in the phonemic system.  Vowel letters
are by and large used to signal whether or not a preceding consonant is
palatalized.  At the end of a word, the "soft sign" (miagkii znak) is used
to signal a final palatalized consonant.  So the vowel and consonant
letters do not really correspond to Russian phonemes much of the time.

It gets worse.  Not only is there a very active rule of vowel reduction,
but the voicing of consonant clusters is usually based on the final
consonant (contrary to English, which tends to base it on the initial
consonant).  Thus, a Russian will say [zbaris@m] for "with Boris", i.e. "s
Borisom" in writing.  An English speaker struggling with Russian will tend
to say [sparisom], because "s" 'with' is spelled with the letter "s", not
"z" and [sb] clusters resolve the voicing in a forward direction.  When
Russians learn to transcribe their language phonemically, it looks as
strange to them as it does to English speakers transcribing English
phonemically.
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
