pronunciation question about Russian

[E Wayles Browne]

Dear Katherine (and list members),
Let me thank you for your answer to Andrew's question--it's useful to me,
too. But there is one part I'd like to disagree with.
For a number of years I've taught a Structure of Russian course using, as
a textbook:

Hamilton, William S.
Title:	 Introduction to Russian phonology and word structure
Published:	 Columbus, Ohio : Slavica Publishers, 1980.

I have often had Russian native speakers (once a Russian/Belarusian native
speaker) among the students. They are in general willing to accept what I
tell them about the phonetics, but they unanimously disagree with
Hamilton's transcriptions when these show pretonic or other unstressed e
reducing to i. Reducing, yes. Reducing in such a way that it merges with
unstressed i, no. And indeed, when I pronounce the words as I learned to
in years of classes with native speakers, I myself don't reduce e after
soft  (and a after soft, and o after soft) all the way to i. I--and the
native speakers in my classes-- keep the distinction between milA and
melA, for instance. And I--and they--in most examples don't reduce e after
hard, or a after hard, or o after hard, all the way up to "jery" (the
letter bI--I don't think much of anybody calls it jery any more, they just
call it y).

What do your phonetic studies show about the loss or maintenance of the
distinction?

Yours,
-- 
Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
Morrill Hall 220, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.

tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h)
fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE)
e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu

> Dear Andrew,
>
> I am not a native speaker, but one of my areas of research is on Russian
> vowel phonetics.  Here is a simple summary that does not assume much
> phonetics background, plus some suggestions of what you can tell
> beginning students.
>
> Stessed positions:
> The pronunciation of /e/ when stressed depends on the preceding
> consonant.  However, note that not all the consonants you ask about have
> the same effect on /e/.  In particular, some of the "sibilants" you
> refer to are always hard (sh, zh, ts), and some of them are always soft
> (ch, shch).  It is the hardness or softness that is important for /e/,
> not the sibilant-ness.
>
> Whenever you see a (stressed) e written in Russian after a zh, sh, or
> ts, it is pronounced like "e oborotnoe" (i.e., the same vowel as in eto
> or etazh).  You also pronounce "normal" e like "e-oborotnoe" in certain
> borrowed words, like kedy and tenis.  Phonetically speaking, this vowel
> is "open-mid".  In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it would be
> given as [?] (that's the epsilon vowel, if it doesn't come through).
>
> When you see "normal" e in any other position (including after ch or
> shch), it is not pronounced like "e-oborotnoe".  The most noticeable
> difference (for English speakers) is that it will have an [i]-like
> on-glide.  Additionally, it has a higher tongue position -- in IPA it is
> close-mid ([e]).  Many English native speakers approximate the [i]
> on-glide by putting in an English "y" sound (i.e., like Russian
> i-kratkoe) before the vowel.  That pronunciation seems to be
> intelligible to native speakers, but does give you an accent.  It is
> better to focus on pronouncing the preceding consonant as really soft,
> but that might be something to save for more advanced students, not
> beginners.
>
> Also, as noted in the email from Robert Rothstein, the consonant that
> comes after a stressed /e/ also affects the pronunciation, although to a
> much lesser extent than the preceding consonant does.  Basically, a
> following soft consonant raises the vowel somewhat, and produces an
> [i]-like off-glide at the end of the vowel.  This off-glide is much less
> noticeable than the [i] on-glide mentioned above.  Also, when an /e/ is
> found *between* two soft consonants, as in chest', some speakers will
> raise it so much that even the middle portion of the vowel sounds like
> [i].  (This is undoubtedly too much detail to introduce into beginning
> Russian classes.)
>
> Unstressed position:
> You also asked about the pronunciation of /e/ when it is unstressed and
> preceded by a sibilant.  This is another case where it is the
> hardness/softness that is important, not really the sibilant-ness.
>
> After soft consonants (including ch and shch), /e/ is pronounced like
> [i].  So, a word like chetverg is pronounced [chitverx].  In phonetics
> books you will see this type of unstressed [i] transcribed using the
> soft-sign symbol.  Avanesov says that the soft-sign phonetic symbol
> denotes only that the vowel is short, not that it is centralized or
> lowered.  Bondarko 1998 (Fonetika Sovremennogo Russkogo Iazyka) is
> consistent with this view as well, but points out that the shorter a
> vowel gets, the less distinctly it is pronounced.  Basically, the
> movement of the tongue that is required for a "clear" pronunciation of
> the vowel will get shortchanged, and the tongue will become displaced
> towards the positions needed for the surrounding consonants.  In many
> cases, this *will* result in some sort of centralization, but that is
> apparently being viewed as an epiphenomenon.  If you tell your students
> to pronounce unstressed e preceded by ch or shch (or any other soft
> consonant) like a short [i] vowel, they will probably get the right
> result.
>
> After hard consonants (including ts, zh, and sh), unstressed e is
> pronounced like a yeri.  So, a word like tsentral'nyj should be
> pronounced like [tsyntral'nyj].  Again, this unstressed yeri is shorter
> than a stressed one would be and therefore has some changes in exactly
> how it sounds, but not enough to trouble beginners with.  In explaining
> this rule to beginners, you might first want to introduce the fact that
> orthographic [i] is pronounced like yeri when preceded by sh, zh, ts
> (examples:  zhit', shit', tsikl are pronounced [zhyt'], [shyt'],
> [tsykl]).  Then, you can just say that unstressed e reduces to i.  The
> change from i to yeri after sh, zh, and ts then comes for free.
>
> I hope this answered your questions!
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Katherine Crosswhite
>
>
>
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