Pronouncing #mC

[Katherine Crosswhite]

Frank Y. Gladney wrote:

>>In the first line of Pushkin's familiar lyric, _Ia pomniu chudnoe 
>>mgnoven'e_, the realized accents are _pom_, _chud_, and _ven_.
>>Possible disagreement over final consonants aside, could someone please 
>>tell me how the three unaccented syllables (if indeed it's just three) 
>>_-noe mgno-_ are pronounced in actual recitation?

As fate would have it, I am currently running a phonetics experiment in the 
sound lab across the hall from my office (on English, not Russian) and 
therefore have all the recording equipment set up and ready to go, and 
there is a Russian native speaker graduate student studying down the hall 
from my office in the departmental reading room.  I asked him to step in to 
the lab for a few minutes and looked spectrographically at his productions 
for that particular line.  When pronouncing it "normally" -- they way one 
would when generally reciting poetry, there was definitely no oral stop 
between the [m] and the [n].  In fact, it did not appear to me that there 
was even a good velar nasal in there.  It appeared to go directly from [m] 
to [n].  When reciting the line "very carefully", there was still no oral 
stop, but there was a clear velar nasal.  I didn't tell him what I was 
going to be looking for when I had him record the utterances, so I think 
these are pretty reflective of typical recitation.

However, the explanation that I would give for this is *not* that native 
speakers can't make a velum raising gesture with the required speed and 
precision.  I would bet you that they could.  Although I don't know that it 
has been done for Russian, there are people who specialize in looking at 
consonant-to-consonant timing. The general consensus is that the amount of 
variation you see in this sort of thing is determined by the language, not 
by the muscles.

-K. 

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