pronunciation question about Russian

[Katherine Crosswhite]

Dear Wayles,

Thanks for your response.  That is an interesting fact to know about.

The answer to your question is that this is still somewhat up in the 
air.  There is evidence on both sides.  All descriptions of CSR written 
by native-speaker phoneticians working inside Russia say that the 
neutralization is complete. Some also present formant measurements that 
seem to confirm that.  I've also looked at formant values for several 
native speakers, and these vowels do seem to be acoustically [i] (or 
actually, [I] or something like that).  However, there is at least one 
formant measurement study (by Jaye Padgett of UC Santa Cruz and Marija 
Tabain of Macquarie University in Sydney) that found that although 
unstressed /e/ (or /a/ or /o/) may reduce to an [I] sound, it is not 
exactly identical to the [I] sound that you get from unstressed 
underlying /i/.  Furthermore, the differences they found were quite 
miniscule, so the fact that you've had this experience with your 
students is quite striking.  One thing I am curious about is the 
distribution of this phenomenon.  Padgett and Tabain were working with 
native speakers from Australia.  Do your students typically grow up in 
Russia then come to the US for college, or have they spent a lot of time 
is US emigre communities when young?  Are they typically from 
Moscow/Petersburg or other places?  Enquiring minds...

Best,

K.



E Wayles Browne wrote:
> 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,
>   

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