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From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: Russian vowel  bI
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Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 01:42:49 GMT
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In article <3l6q06$bul@news.ycc.yale.edu>,
Ken Balakrishnan <kbalakri@minerva.cis.yale.edu> wrote:
>Richard Wojcik (rickw@eskimo.com) wrote:
>: St. Petersburg school), originally argued for a single phoneme.  Whatever
>: the historical facts, it now appears that the two sounds can be used to
>: contrast words.  It is true that a preceding consonant dictates [y] if it
>: is unpalatalized and [i] if it is palatalized, but [y] and [i] appear to be
>: able to distinguish words when there is no preceding consonant to govern the
>: front/back character.  What we really have is a case of partial phonemic
>: overlap, something like the English intervocallic flap.  (Well, maybe.  I
>
>Historically, (i.e. in Proto-Slavic), the two were certainly separate 
>phonemes.  I'm not fluent in Russian, but I don't know of any words that 
>begin with the sound /y/, except when they appear with a proclitic ending
>in a hard consonant.  Can you give some examples?

Historically, they were separate phonemes that underwent phonemic merger.
(Of course, the reflex of /y/ was a different vowel altogether.)  I used to
believe that they 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.  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.  Having learned Russian in the US, and largely from emigres, I
had always been taught to use the archaic "yerih" name for the letter.  I
had been unaware of current practice, as are many Americans who have
learned their Russian primarily in the US.

>The original poster was asking about final "-ya" in feminine nominatives, 
>which by the rules you listed should be pronounced [i] (following either
>the palatal /j/ or a palatalized consonant), but which is in practice 
>pronounced as a schwa.  My point was that the Russian grammatical endings 
>have their own rules of reduction which are conditioned both 
>phonologically and morphologically.  Compare, for example, nominative 
>singular "polye" [pol'@] with the prepositional singular "polye" [pol'i] 
>(both meaning "field").

Right.  That is a good point.  Inflectional affixes do tend to resist
phonological processes more.  That is something to be aware of when you
study any language with affixes.
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
