Pronouncing #mC

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Katherine Crosswhite wrote:

> 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.

Fascinating anecdotal evidence. Wish there were more data points.

> 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.

Intepretation of such data is a complex art, as you well know. There are 
tensions between linguistic universals, which are strongly influenced by 
physiology and neurology, and language-specific constraints (e.g., we 
tend to be sloppy in areas that don't affect comprehension and very 
precise where the differences are significant). Not to mention style, 
register, sociolinguistic factors, etc. etc.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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