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From: "Vladimir Menkov" <vmenkov@cs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: Russian vowel  bI
Message-ID: <1995Apr1.174759.4546@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Computer Science, Indiana University
References: <3kcq7c$167k@news.ccit.arizona.edu> <D64nFE.IKG@eskimo.com> <1995Mar29.145311.11345@news.cs.indiana.edu> <D68CGy.8F3@eskimo.com>
Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 17:47:52 -0500
Lines: 99

In article <D68CGy.8F3@eskimo.com>, Richard Wojcik <rickw@eskimo.com> wrote:
>In article <1995Mar29.145311.11345@news.cs.indiana.edu>,
>Vladimir Menkov <vmenkov@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:
>
>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?  

Somewhat less "natural" then articulation of cardinal vowels, and
about as "artificial" as pronouncing an _isolated_ consonant (such as
"k" or "z") or, say, a specific allophone of the phoneme /a/. 

I.e. a textbook may tell you that /a/ is realized as a more backed
vowel in front of /l/, or a more fronted in front of a palatalized
consonant, or even more fronted between two palatalized vowels; after
you realize what this means, it is not that difficult to pronounce
the vowel in isolation; but this requires some conscious action,
and so does articulation of an isolated or word-initial /y/.

I think the poster who started this thread (Ekki?) also noticed
that people pronounced the sound /y/ in isolation rather different
from the way it sounds in words. This perhaps is due to the
"consciousness" of the articulation.

> Do the words beginning with /y/ sound like a kind of foreign
>accent to you?  

Definitely.

>If so, then they may well violate Russian phonology.

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

Of course one can do this, and listeners probably will understand.  It
even appeared once (for the comic effect, I think) in the title of a
movie back in the 1970's.

>>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?  

It may be, but the English Queen is also the Queen of Australia,
or at least this used to be the case until recently.

>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.  

I meant the fricative, of course.

>  Prounounceability is a cardinal property of phonemes.  

Yes; and the other property is that in some contexts it contrasts
with other phonemes. 

I see that my analogy was a flawed one; you are right that /3/ is
already a phoneme, because it contrasts with /d3/ or /S/ in (A) the
intervocalic position (as in `pleasure'), and, (B) (with some
speakers) in word-final position as in `garage'.  In words like
`equation' (C), [3] seems to be in free variation with [S].

So the context (C) probably does not warrant a phoneme status for [3],
but contexts (A) and (C) do. You were right that teaching
schoolchildren to pronounce the new letter name, `zhee' (/3i/) (and
also a few French and Brazilian palcenames with word-initial /3/), and
concomitant appearance of a word-initial context for /3/ is not
necessary for recognizing /3/ as a phoneme.

Now, it seems that the ONLY context in which Russian /y/ contrasts
with /i/ is the word-initial; and this contrast is observed only in
the name of the letter (which one does not routinely have to pronounce
unless one goes to a school that teaches it), and in a dozen of
foreign (personal and place) names (which 90% of the population have
never had to pronounce). Despite hundreds of years of contact with
Turkic peoples, there are no borrowings (other than place names) in
Russian starting with this sound. For me this implies that if /y/ is
phoneme, it is a phoneme only of the/an "educated dialect" (as /f/ was
at some point both in Russian and in English, or as /v/ is in Kazakh).

I am not a linguist, and don't want to argue against opinions which
are results of significant study and research. I just find it curious
how small the amount of evidence that is sufficient to make a sound a
phoneme is; how strongly extra-linguistic factors may influence a
sound's status as a phoneme; and how precarious, therefore, this
status can be.

	--Vladimir





