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From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: Russian vowel  bI
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References: <3kcq7c$167k@news.ccit.arizona.edu> <3l6q06$bul@news.ycc.yale.edu> <D64nFE.IKG@eskimo.com> <1995Mar29.145311.11345@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 1995 01:36:34 GMT
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In article <1995Mar29.145311.11345@news.cs.indiana.edu>,
Vladimir Menkov <vmenkov@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:
>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.

Alexis made the point that Russians had no difficulty pronouncing these
words differently from those beginning with the letter "i".  It was not
just a question of spelling, or I would agree with you.  Actually, neither
Alexis nor I am a native speaker of Russian.  You are.  So tell me, do you
find the articulation of an initial /y/ (vs. /i/) to be in any way
artificial or unnatural?  I am not asking you about the knowledge that such
words are somehow foreign-sounding, which might be attributed to
morphological intuition.  I am asking how you feel about ease of
articulation.  Note that English has foreign borrowings such as the
expression "raison d'etre", which is often pronounced with a kind of French
accent.  Do the words beginning with /y/ sound like a kind of foreign
accent to you?  If so, then they may well violate Russian phonology.

>> 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.

How natural is it to use the name of the letter in a sentence?

>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?

Is Australia not a republic?  Anyway, I'm not sure what consonant sound you
are assigning to "yogh".  I pronounce all those words with the voiced
alveo-palatal fricative, which is very much a phoneme of English.  If you
mean a palatal stop, then I would reply that it is a phoneme for those who
can pronounce it freely.  Prounounceability is a cardinal property of
phonemes.  
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
