Russian phonology (Was: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE)

[Hans-Werner Hatting]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001 16:05:38 0500, David L. White wrote:

>the degree of velarization in "yeri" (henceforth "I"), is more than would
>be predicted from velarization of a preceding consonant alone, so that we
>must (or depending on theory might) conclude that /I/ is an independent
>target, i.e. a phoneme, probably picked up from Uralic.

I cannot follow you here. Do you want to say that, in Russian, <I> is a
phoneme separate from /i/? Since when is the degree of presence of a
phonetical feature in itself an indicator of phonemicity? I don't want to
restart last years' discussion on what constitutes a phoneme, but I think we
can agree on that we have to look at whether we have occurrences of distinct
sounds in phonologically identical environments concurring with distinctions
of meaning.
If we look at the Russian material, we have a phoneme /i/ with the
allophones <i> in anlaut position and after palatalised conconants, and <I>
after non-palatalised consonants. I do not know of a single case in Russian
where this rule would be violated. So there simply is no basis for
establishing a separate phoneme /I/.
If you want to say that <I> ought to be seen as the "basic" realisation of
the phoneme /i/, so that this phoneme ought to be called /I/, you are of
course free to do so, although the fact that <I> cannot appear in anlaut
position would in my opinion speak against such an assertion.
One point where /i/ is unique among vowel phonemes in Russian is the fact
that it is the only of them where the allophone occurring after palatalised
vowels is the one occurring in anlaut position, while for the other ones it
is the allophone occurring after non-palatalised vowels. But, from a
naturality viewpoint, it is exactly the phoneme where we would expect such a
deviation most.
This, of course, does not mean that the particular realisation of the
allophone <I> cannot have been an influence from Uralic, but I have to leave
this question to the Uralicists.

Best regards,
H. W. Hatting