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I have formant values of Russian vowels from Sound Pattern of Russian (1959) and would like to create an image of a vowel chart/trapezium using this information. However, there is no general formant value for these vowels. Instead, consonant vowel (pa, pʲa, va, etc) and vowel consonant (um, upʲ, up etc) sequences, as well as a few example words, are given (You can see most of the relevant appendix in the Google Preview of the book). Averaging all these together wouldn't be a good idea. Instead, we should pick an environment most representative of these vowels. Does anyone have an opinion on what might be the best choice? — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 00:21, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
Dale Chock has argued in this edit summary that Bidwell (1962) is a "maverick, mistake riddled proposal" and that mention of it gives undue weight to a fringe proposal. However, there are two issues that I think complicate the matter.
1. It's my understanding, based on Stankiewicz (1962) that the analysis proposed by Bidwell (1962) is one of a number of similar analyses. While he doesn't provide full citations, Stankiewicz lists six scholars that he says make similar claims:
Similarly, Folejewski lists (also without full citations) of scholars who seem to implicitly adopt an analysis similar to Bidwell's:
I don't think we should remove a paragraph about something broader than Bidwell (1962) simply because of problems with Bidwell. If we had a better understanding of the place that these other scholars (as well as the ones I listed in the archives) have in the general scholarship, it might help us get a better understanding of whether mentioning this analysis really gives undue weight. I have restored the paragraph in question with a POV-section tag to draw others to this discussion.
2. Several editors have alluded (see above and in this archived discussion) to a more robust dispute amongst Russian linguists between a five-vowel analysis (prominent in Moscow schools) and six-vowel analysis (prominent in St. Petersburg) that is, whether ы represents a phoneme or an allophone. I'm not familiar enough with this dispute, but I wouldn't be surprised if the six-vowel analysis also collapses the phonemicity of hard-soft contrasts in ways similar to Bidwell and others. Again, looking into sources would help out in this regard. Either way, I don't think we have enough sourcing present in the article to back up this removal of a citation request, which is why I have restored it. — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 23:23, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
Per this edit, where Dale describes a table as "trivial" and "uninformative," I would have to wholeheartedly disagree. Not only does it show what kinds of clusters are possible in Russian, but it is sourced, coming from a more elaborate table in Halle (1959) that is even duplicated in Chew (2010). Remember that this project is for lay readers who may not have as intuitive an understanding about phonotactics as experts like you and me.
Also, Dale, removals of citation requests like this are inappropriate. In this case, it is a misrepresentation to say that I have requested confirmation that the phrase exists. It only takes a little bit of common sense (and also the ability to read what I wrote in the edit summary when I restored it the last time you deleted it) to know that the citation request is not for the phrase in question, which obviously exists; it is for the claim that it has a five-consonant cluster. Sources I've seen say that Russian has a maximum of four-consonant clusters, and if I felt more confident that I'd read a representative sample on Russian phonotactics I would even mark the claim with a "dubious" tag. Instead, I'm giving you (or other editors) a chance to provide sourcing that states that Russian allows five-consonant clusters. You got it from a source, didn't you? — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 12:01, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
This is in response to the message from AEsos on 12:01, 25 April 2012, regardiing documentation of various lengths of consonant clusters.
I want to open with overall comments about AEsos's editing practices. He fetishizes the criterion of sourcing, believing he is free to insert anything into Wikipedia that complies with the Reliable Source policy. This is self serving, because it's not hard to find a source for something, especially something trivially true. He disregards other criteria. He usually ignores criticisms of his edits entirely. When he doesn't ignore them, his defense is usually limited to "it's sourced" -- which is always beside the point when discussing AEsos editing Wikipedia.
AEsos's approach in editing this issue over five years has been especially goofy because of the incongruity between his making a strong (i.e., remarkable) point that Russian allows four consonants word initially, and his shining the spotlight on the unremarkable shorter clusters.
The bad thing about inserting lists (tabular or otherwise) of examples of clusters of two consonants and of three consonants is that most of the world's languages have words with "clusters" (unbroken sequences) of two consonants. It is Aspergerish to document that English, Russian, or any of thousands of other languages allow sequences of two consonants. The objection that this is a point only plain to "experts" is disingenuous. AEsos also proudly claims his examples are sourced. But you are not supposed to source points of fact which are trivial or which are common knowledge to multitudes of people (there's even a discussion saying so in the Wikipedia policies).
AEsos raises a further objection: we should not assume that the Russian spelling 'k vzglʲadu' is pronounced as written. This objection is no good, because as follows. (1) We do not need to prove that a particular Russian spelling is unrealistic just AEsos, in an attitude of linguistic chauvinism, finds it hard to believe it is realistic. What we would need to prove instead is that a Russian word is NOT pronounced as spelled. Where Russian is not pronounced as spelled, THEN it is appropriate to inform the reader. Indeed, the article already discusses multiple categories of this phenomenon. (2) Furthermore, for AEsos to raise this objection only reaffirms his ignorance of even beginning Russian. By the way, on his User talk page he discloses that he hasn't tried to learn the Russian language, he only studies how it is pronounced and spelled. This after five years of editing "Russian phonology". As I was about to say: in elementary Russian, one learns that the pronunciation of the words 'k', 's', and 'v' has to be expanded to ko, so, vo before some words, as in ko mnʲe. THIS IS INDICATED IN THE NATIVE RUSSIAN SPELLING SYSTEM.
There was a telling incident in this article in 2008. AEsos reverted a fluent speaker on points of vocabulary and grammar! He insisted on a bogus gloss (gorbunʲja means 'hunchback (agentive)') based on a bogus general grammar claim (that an "agentive" meaning is indicated by a suffix -ʲja). Aesos himself originated this misinformation ( Revision as of 22:30, 25 May 2008)). When another editor corrected this on 16 Sept (the word actually means 'female hunchback'), AEsos, in act of complacency and recklessness, reverted, inventing a bogus grammar claim: "female would be gorbuna". Latin and Spanish derive feminine nouns with -a, but Russian doesn't. Only when a native speaker snapped, "Consult a dictionary!" two days later did AEsos fall into line. (Readers can see all this for themselves in the article history.) By the way, this happened at the same time that AEsos had been reverted on basic spelling (e.g., he was ignorant of the simple fact that in Russian spelling, every infinitive ends in a soft sign, except the handful than end in -i!). Aside from ignorance of Russian, let us note one point of ignorance of linguistics. As a linguistic matter, it is makes little sense to conceive of there being an agentive form of a noun denoting a personal quality, like 'tall', 'blond', 'hunchback'. Dale Chock ( talk) 07:37, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
Can anybody provide a list of initial/final consonant clusters of English? I think it would be more interesting to demonstrate only those Russian ones that have no English counterparts. (Say, тк- or рт- would be more interesting than тр-). -- 68.127.102.86 ( talk) 04:07, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
Regarding edits done just within the hour. AEsos has freshly restored POV content that is POV because (1) it overemphasizes morphemes over words; (2) it goes into detail illustrating points that linguists find nonnotable; (3) it reflects AEsos's prejudices.
Number (1) is due to his misunderstanding of the subject dating back to early 2008, when he inserted statements about permissible consonant sequences in Russian words citing Halle 1959. In the four ensuing years, nobody corrected AEsos that Halle meant morphemes, not words. (Of course, in Russian, as in English, many morphemes, like 'dog, tree, talk', can be whole phonological words.) AEsos was giving the misinformation during four years that sequences of four consonants were rare in Russian words because he was ignorant of the meaning of 'morpheme', which is 'word root'. In English, there are many words with four consonants in a row, like 'heartbreak' or 'construct'; note the sequences '-rtbr- and '-nstr'. In fact, in English these sequences are possible within a single phonological word due to compounding of whole words ('heart' plus 'break') or derivation (the affix morpheme 'con-' plus the lexical morpheme '-struct'). This leads us to the relevant point that the same statements are true for Russian. There are LOTS of quadruple consonant clusters in Russian due to affixation or to word compounding. On the other hand, as stated in the article, Russian has only two roots which have four consonants in a row. AEsos dwells on restrictions within morphemes, which are of less significance to linguists than restrictions within words. And he is waging an edit war to keep dwelling on morphemes. He's imposing POV. Morphemes and words usually have different restrictions as to sound structure. In Spanish, for example, words almost never can end in two consonants, and they certainly cannot in two obstruents (fricatives and stops), like in 'want' and 'list' in English. However, Spanish has at least hundreds of morphemes that end in pairs of obstruents, like 'cant-' and 'list-' in words 'canto' and 'listo'. Moreover, as the previous two Spanish words show, the pair '-st-' can freely occur in Spanish words, just not at the end of a word.
Point number (2) is about his two tables, (with example words) of permissible consonant pairs and consonant trios in Russian morphemes. To linguists, this material is trivial, therefore, AEsos is confirming his lack of expertise. Among the world's languages having sequences of two consonants is an ordinary phenomenon, totally nonnotable. What's notable is languages that prohibit two consonants in a row. Moreover, as regards categories of consonant pairs and consonant trios, it is utterly ordinary for them to include 'l, r, w, y' (to use English spelling). What's notable is consonant trios where all three consonants are stops or fricatives.
Point number (3) is about AEsos's insistence on demanding a citation for the quintuple sequence /kvzglʲ/, i.e., that this is pronounced as spelled. Contrary to what he would have us believe, Russian spelling shows Russian pronunciation, except for as noted in reference works. The reference words note MANY exceptions, many of which this article already cites. AEsos's contributions to three articles, including this one, have been discussed ad infinitum on talk pages including this one, and have been proven full of misinformation and lazy copy editing, e.g., where he misspells things and doesn't catch it for four years. But addressing this specific disagreement with him: he doesn't make the same sourcing demand for shorter consonant sequences, in Russian or English. That establishes the English centeredness of his demand. It also proves his failure to notice what all these sources tell him. He cites Cubberley, Halle, Jones & Ward copiously, plus he dabbles in specialist journals. He has inserted dozens of citations. How has he failed to notice where they say that spellings of four or five consonants to start off a word are phonetically unrealistic? The answer is that they don't say it. So for that additional reason -- i.e., the experts offer no admonitions in this regard -- he has no business demanding for this insertion to be sourced. Dale Chock ( talk) 23:55, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
People usually edit Wikipedia outside of a Wikipedia account because they don't expect to participate at length in any one article, or because they want to be naughty or disruptive. Since neither of these describes your participation, I wonder why you haven't created an account at Wikipedia after a couple of dozen or so edits over nearly one month. Although a few of your remarks are constructive, it seems overall like a waste of time to reply to, or try to build on, contributions and comments by someone who doesn't even commit to being an accountable member of the community. I'm curious what you think. Dale Chock ( talk) 05:13, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
Until recent weeks, the article devoted many citations to a single point: which syllable gets the stress in the infinitive of the word for 'to rust'? These footnotes documented that the speakers are split on whether the first syllable or the second.
It turns out this bloated insertion arose from a lingering emotional state that started in 2008. Editor AEsos provided a list of examples to illustrate a category of morphophonological alternation: hard and soft consonants. One example involved this infinitive. At some point, AEsos reverted a native speaker on the pronunciation of this word: specifically, AEsos insisted the word is not pronounced as the native speaker claimed. What a scandalous act! Well, it happens that this word has alternative pronunciations among Russians. So it would also be wrong to claim there is but one correct pronunciation. One day (18 Sep 2008), the native speaker fixed the bad edit. Anyway, ever since, AEsos has been accumulating dictionary citations in order to prove that there are alternative stress patterns. Just one source would do. Well, also in order to prove that one of the pronunciations has been gaining favor with the decades--a point which is equally useless in this particular article.
Originally, I modified this discussion only by reducing the number of dictionaries cited. But actually, it is a poor idea to dwell on sporadic unpredictable or irregular words. Since this particular phenomenon is trivial and also is not invoked to prove any other point in the article, and because of finding out the motivation for all the citations, I have deleted it. Dale Chock ( talk) 11:28, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
I have just restored glosses inserted by at 13:12 30 April 2012 and 10:52 1 May 2012 by Special:Contributions/68.127.102.86. The deletions were done by User:Aeusoes1 at 15:25 1 May with the edit summary, "glosses don't need to be exhaustive". We're talking about a mere nine instances where "68.127.102.86" used 2 to 4 words instead of one word. This is a disgrace, for an ensconced editor to hurry (it was with only a day's delay) to throw water on concise, helpful additions by a new editor. The new editor at least insinuates that he/she is fluent in spoken Russian, which would be a big enhancement to the production of this article.
I consider these deletions an act of hypocrisy on the part of User:Aeusoes1 because since 2008 he has indulged in excesses in exemplification and in sourcing.
(1) He cited 62 instances in a row (in the form of a table) of the alternation between 'e' and 'o'. (2) He cited 17 instances in a row of hard-soft paired consonant alternations. (3) As documented in a section above during this week, he compiled an excessive number of citations of dictionaries over a period of years just to prove that one particular word can be pronounced two ways, and his motivation for this miniproject was he had told a native speaker that speaker's own pronunciation was wrong.
That was as of 27 March 2012. I myself have since thinned these excesses. Dale Chock ( talk) 17:57, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
On 6 May 2012, User talk:aeusoes1 left a long response about these glosses on my user talk page. He didn't explain why not here. From perusing both this page and that response, it doesn't seem like he repeated the parts of that response on this page. That is really something. More than once, he has suggested that a remark I have placed on an article talk page belongs elsewhere. Whether he's right or wrong about that, here I have him NOT placing on an article talk page a comment that cannot be construed any other way than that it is about the insertions in the article! You wonder whether it was a slipup, that he meant to post it here. Anyway, I won't be reading that comment on my talk page. I will read those remarks if they're posted here. Dale Chock ( talk) 05:08, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
"На месте глухих согласных перед звонкими (кроме [в]) произносятся соответствующие звонкие".
Avanesov's pronunciation guide in "Орфоэпический словарь русского языка" (Borunova, Vorontsova, Yes'kova, 1983), p. 670.
Apologies are expected. -- 68.127.102.86 ( talk) 08:12, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
attributed to Lightner 1972. This fact is reinforced by Halle (1959:64):"/v/ and /vʲ/ are unusual in that they seem transparent to voicing assimilation; in the syllable onset, both voiced and voiceless consonants may appear before /v(ʲ)/ . . . When /v(ʲ)/ precedes and follows obstruents, the voicing of the cluster is governed by that of the final segment (per the rule above) so that voiceless obstruents that precede /v(ʲ)/ are voiced if /v(ʲ)/ is followed by a voiced obstruent (e.g. к вдове [ɡ vdɐˈvʲɛ] 'to the widow') . . . ."
That is, in the last case г = [g]; or to put it another way: мог вздохнуть is not pronounced мок вздохнуть. Obviously, the great Avanesov you cite left out an important exception."Note that {v} and {v,} play no independent role. Everything transpires as if {v} and {v,} had been absent; e.g., мог войти [mokvajt,'i] ... мог вернуть, [mokv,ern'ut,] ..., but мог вздохнуть, [mogvzdaxn'ut,]".
So, the observed pronunciation is dual. However, two pronunciation dictionaries make no special exception for this case, thus we have to implicitly suppose that the nearest general rule must be applied (I've cited it above), i.e. the prescribed pronunciation is rather [kvz...] than [gvz...]. -- 68.127.102.86 ( talk) 06:26, 6 May 2012 (UTC)...наблюдение показывает, что перед группами [вб], [вд], [вз] и т. д. у одних говорящих по-русски происходит «озвончение» глухих, у других его не происходит (т. е. у одних невозможны сочетания «глухой согласный + [в] или [в'] + звонкий согласный», а у других возможны). Это — случай, когда «норма... состоит в отсутствии нормы» (Л. В. Щерба). Объяснение очевидно: эти сочетания редкостны, ведь говорится обычно не к вдове, под вздутием, от взвода, а ко вдове, подо вздутием, ото взвода. На стыке же полнозначных слов (идет вдова) вообще законы озвончения менее строги, чем в середине слова...
(My note: the "evident explanation" is not correct, as the Google books' statistics is strictly opposite. Especially in what relates to от(о) взвода: more than 4000 usages of от взвода vs only three (just three, not three thousands) ото взвода, and two of these three are from Panov himself and from a citation of his book.)
The first three were leading authorities in older Russian phonology. The latter two are leading authorities in general phonology from 1970 to at least 2000. Avanesov, Jakobson (Moscow, 1896), and Kiparsky are native speakers (Kiparsky was born and raised abroad, but his father was a Russian Slavicist). Halle and Kiparsky were Jakobson's students. It is ridiculous to suppose all these Russian speakers and linguists missed something M.V. Panov noticed. The paper by Padgett, who is a specialist in Russian phonology, examines some phenomena which are controversial among the specialists. But the phenomenon we are discussing is not controversial. Even if you have understood Panov's opinion perfectly, the most you can insist on is to report his contrarian opinion. Dale Chock ( talk) 13:58, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
To the unregistered new editor, 68.127.102.86, who has been inserting a whole lot of footnotes in the last few hours. Your format is out of compliance with Wikipedia style. Therefore, these edits are going to create a lot of extra work for fellow editors to rectify them. A first stop for learning footnote and bibliography style is WP:Cite. See also WP:Cite book, WP:Cite journal, WP:Cite article, etc.
Beyond formatting of dates, pages and author names, the tone of your wording in footnotes is less encyclopedic than it should be. Phrases like "see" are usually considered too redundant in Wikipedia style. In general, your style is an old fashioned wordier style, which is out of place here. It is even more outdated in having the year late in the citation. The correct sequence in the bibliography is author, year, title.
It is preferable not to put bibliographic citations in footnotes. Instead, just author, year, and page (or chapter or section).
I note that you do not reply to my justifications for edits and reverts stated in edit summaries or on the Talk page. You do not match my reasons with your own, including in your edit summaries. This abruptness makes you edits more liable to being reverted. For example, you insist on talking about "the names of the letters", but the name of Ы is not the bare vowel, in contrast to the case with И. This makes your claim seem to be in disregard of the facts. Another example is your insistence that the Russian education ministry teaches six vowels down to the present, but as you persistently add sources, these additions persistently do not include sources that confirm present day practice. Dale Chock ( talk) 13:10, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Bundling of footnotes. I discovered that Wikipedia enables this while retaining separate hyperlinks. I restored your bundles. Dale Chock ( talk) 10:35, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
I propose do not mention Ostapenko there. She lists some examples (maybe most frequently used ones) and adds "etc." I collected the full set from common dictionaries. With the exception of two occasionalisms, the words are quite common; I believe, any big enough dictionary contains them (or at least similar words with the same prefixes+roots).
The two occasionalisms were found by Google, namely:
I'm not sure whether these links are important enough to be placed in the article. -- 68.127.102.86 ( talk) 15:22, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Twice this week Aesos has been reverted with the allegation by me that a passage is a misquotation of the source. In arrogance, this other editor has blithely restored the disputed passages without explaining how his insertion does not constitute misinformation.
The source, Cubberley p. 82, is unfortunately ambiguous: one cannot be sure of his intended meaning. But logically that means you cannot assume the strong interpretation, as Aesos does. The problem passage in the source is:
"Here we have remnants of older simplifications which occurred as the language shifted from open- to closed-syllable structure. Currently, here as elsewhere, the language is undergoing spelling influence which resists simplification. Some of the groups and words involved are:
(1) by dissimilation." [Here, Cubberley lists some spelled consonant clusters that retain the reduced pronuncation, others that are being "restored" by some speakers.]
"(2) by deletion." [Here, Cubberley lists some words spelled '-vstv-' that retain the simplified pronunciation, others that are being "restored". But, then he lists seven clusters of three or more consonants, which are all dentals or mostly dentals, that underwent simplification, and for none of these seven does Cubberley report any counterexamples.]
Aesos's confusion is to have wrongly extended the scope of the early part of the quotation. Aesos created "counterexamples" that are not clearly affirmed by Cubberley, let alone stated by Cubberley, and it's possible that Cubberley would reject them. Logically, you can't cite a source in support of an insertion that the source does not clearly support. Once again, this other editor misunderstands what he has read--and once again, he doesn't bother to refute arguments against his insertions. In this case, he needs to find an unambiguous source. Dale Chock ( talk) 06:12, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
I've reverted prior to the edit war. Deleting citation requests is not acceptable.
Go ahead and restore the changes that you both agree on. As for the rest, please settle it here. — kwami ( talk) 23:12, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
There is currently a dispute in the article, one that is spread throughout this talk page. This dispute has modified over time as new information is uncovered and edits to the article have accumulated. It is not my intention to document the evolution of the dispute but, rather, focus on the current state of editors' positions. It is my hope that, by centralizing the discussion in one thread, involved editors are more likely to respond to each other and that outside editors considering involvement will not feel the burden of having to read all the conversation that has occurred in the last two months. I will first present the content under dispute, then summarize the most up-to-date arguments for its inclusion, and, finally, provide my own response.
Part 1: The content. The dispute in question is whether Russian phonotactics allows for the pronunciation of clusters with more than four consonants in the syllable onset. Since late April, the article has claimed that it does, though with various changes in wording. Its current form in the article is:
Thus, prepositions (especially the three that consist of just a single consonant: к, с, and в) contribute to phonological words with up to five consonant clusters in the syllable onset. Examples are к взгляду [gvzglʲadu] 'to [the] gaze', к встрече, 'to/for [a, the] meeting', as in 'ready for a meeting'.
Part 2: Arguments for. The quotations below, which are more illustrative than exhaustive, are from Dale Chock, who originally included the claim under dispute and is its primary proponent in this talk page. Since these arguments are located in this talk page, I have not provided links to them. My focus is on just the arguments for the claim in question; other methods of rhetorical persuasion, such as appeals to authority or ad hominem attacks, will not be addressed.
Part 3: Ƶ§œš¹'s responses and rebuttals. The justifications for my position, expanded on below, boil down to this: Russian has well-known patterns of mismatches between orthography and pronunciation, often due to consonant cluster reduction. This, in combination with explicit claims in scholarship of a four-consonant maximum in the syllable onset, prompts me to believe that four consonants are the maximum in the syllable onset, with potentially larger clusters being reduced through deletion and epenthesis (processes that also occur with smaller clusters). I believe it is original research to assume that these claims of a four-consonant maximum are limited to lexical (rather than phonological) words, and I don't believe that the orthographically represented process of epenthesizing ‹о› with prefixes and prepositions can account for Russian speakers' general strategies in dealing with complex onsets.
Points 1 and 2: Inaccuracies in orthographic representations. I do not dispute that Russian has a transparent orthography (Point 1). I also do not dispute the general position of Dale's that the burden is on editors wishing to argue that a given orthographic representation is inaccurate in Russian (point 2). While I have made efforts to fulfill this burden, it seems that it has not yet been convincing. As such, I have taken the effort to search resources available to me to further back up my case that the claim in question (that Russian allows more than four consonants in the syllable onset) requires attribution. Here are my justifications:
Point 3: Affixation and phonological words. To put it bluntly, Dale's edits show a reliance on source synthesis to back up the claim that Russian allows more than four consonants in the syllable onset, a claim that none of the sources cited backs up. WP:SYNTH states:
Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. If one reliable source says A, and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C that is not mentioned by either of the sources.
Here is how the claims present in the article are an OR synthesis of the sources presented:
This shows that, despite the sourcing present, one can't extrapolate the claim in question from the sources given.
In addition, Dale has rephrased the wording of a claim using a source (Ostapenko 2005) that contradicts his claim and cited it to back up claims it does not make. Again, the source in question states: "The possible onset in Russian can be even more complex, as it tolerates up to four consonants at the beginning of the syllable.”
While this statement was used in this article to back up a claim about a four-consonant maximum in the syllable onset, Dale has reworded it to: "Some maintain that there is in fact a systematic four-consonant limitation in the syllable onset of lexical words." This adds extra claims that are not backed up in Ostapenko. Here is the breakdown:
The first bullet point is something that I don't think Dale intended. It seems that he meant to hedge usage of Ostapenko's strong claim about onset limits with weasel wording designed to cast doubt into how representative this view is. Altering the attribution to explicitly state that Ostapenko is meant to be an example of this first bullet point would still not fix this problem; as I have shown above, her view is much more representative than "some maintain" would imply. It would also be original research, as an article's use as an example of meta-claims would be insufficient verification of such meta-claims.
The third bullet point involves Dale assuming in his reading of Ostapenko the very thing he wishes to prove (that there is a difference between onset limits of lexical words and those of phonological words). This false attribution might be more understandable had Ostapenko's examples been composed solely of lexical words. But she used no such lexical examples to reinforce this claim. Even if she had, Dale's wording still introduces novel information that she does not claim and that non-experts—even native speakers of Russian—would not see as obvious.
Point 4: Orthographic representation of epenthesis. Rubach (2000) says (p. 53) that the epenthesized vowel of single-consonant prepositions and prefixes occur when the following onset is a consonant cluster beginning with the same consonant as the preposition (barring voicing distinctions). This backs up Cubberley's (2002) more general statement about geminates in consonant clusters. Importantly, Cubberley (p. 83) states that there are two "lexically specific clusters" that this epenthesis is extended to: мн- ('me') and вс- ('all'). I believe Dale pointed out this process of vowel epenthesis to show that Russian has a method (indicated in the orthography) of dealing with difficult or awkward consonant clusters. However, the environment where these prepositions and prefixes occur with an epenthetic vowel is a very specific one, meant primarily to deal with geminate consonants in clusters and not as a general method of dealing with otherwise difficult consonant clusters.
Like I have already said, it's possible that the sources I have access to provide a skewed presentation of Russian phonotactics, but I have shown that there is reason to doubt the claim of more than four consonants in the syllable onset. This is why I have marked the claim in the article. Editors are welcome to contribute to the discussion, though I ask that you please keep them in the Discussion subsection immediately below. Thank you — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 15:35, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Having been away from the article for a few weeks, it came to my attention only today that on 20 May, Aesos made the following amendment, thereby misidentifying case forms:
BEFORE: Because prepositions in Russian act like clitics, [1] the syntactic phrase of a preposition and a following word constitutes a phonological word that acts like a single grammatical word; e.g., к вдове [ɡvdɐˈvʲɛ] 'to the widow', от вдовы [ɐdvdɐˈvɨ] 'from the widow'. [2] [3] Thus, prepositions (especially the three that consist of just a single consonant: к, с, and в) contribute to phonological words with up to five consonant clusters in the syllable onset. Examples are к взгляду [gvzglʲadu] 'to [the] gaze', к встрече, 'to/for [a, the] meeting', as in 'ready for a meeting'. In the syllable coda, suffixes that contain no vowels may increase the final consonant cluster of a syllable (e.g. Ноябрьск 'city of Noyabrsk' |no'jabrʲ|+|sk| > [nɐ'jabrʲsk]), theoretically up to seven consonants: монстрств ['monstrstf] 'of monsterships'. [4]
AFTER: Because prepositions in Russian act like clitics, [1] the syntactic phrase of a preposition (most notably, the three that consist of just a single consonant: к, с, and в) and a following word constitutes a phonological word that acts like a single grammatical word. [3]
For example, the phrase с друзья́х('with friends') is pronounced [zdrʊˈzʲax].In the syllable coda, suffixes that contain no vowels may increase the final consonant cluster of a syllable (e.g. Ноябрьск 'city of Noyabrsk' |no'jabrʲ|+|sk| > [nɐ'jabrʲsk]), theoretically up to seven consonants: монстрств ['monstrstf] 'of monsterships'. [4]
Against his usual practice, Aesos did not source this boneheaded pairing of a Russian expression and an English gloss (which confuses a gen/loc plural with an instrumental plural). His phonetic transcription wasn't even correct. Where capital 'C' means a consonant, Cья doesn't read [Cʲa], it reads [Cʲja]. The next day, a native speaker corrected the translation error by changing the Russian form to fit the English meaning; but without correcting the error in phonetic transcription.
What a brilliant reinforcement that Aesos only knows isolated sentences that he collects for citations purposes, lacking any true familiarity with his subject. Dale Chock ( talk) 21:31, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
References
re: "was always soft few decades ago" - "few decades ago" must be replaced with absolute time reference. (I hope wikipedia or its content will survive a few more decades :-) - Altenmann >t 09:40, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
The recent edits by the anonymous editor added some good information, though the tables didn't work very well, in my opinion. I think the problem is that there are so many words in them that they don't do a good job of quickly summarizing information. Perhaps, instead of replacing the prose, we can add simplified tables to augment it. For example:
Phoneme | Position | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
V(C) | VCʲ | CV(C) | CVCʲ | CʲV(C) | CʲVCʲ | |
/a/ | [a] | [æ] | ||||
/o/ | [o] | [ɵ̞] | [ɵ̞] | |||
/u/ | [u] | [ʉ] | ||||
/e/ | [ɛ̝] | [e] | [ɛ̠] | [e̠] | [ɛ̝] | [e] |
/i/ | [i], [ɨ] | [ɨ] | [i] | [i̝] |
If we do want that last column with some comments, they should be short.
A couple of other things
Let me know if I've accidentally removed citations or information in the process of removing the tables and touching up the article. I believe I kept it all in there, but I may have missed something. — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 15:40, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
re: " only soft [dʲ] appears before soft [lʲ] " -- this is quite wrong. длина подлец для all have hard 'd' . In fact, I have difficulties to think of the opposite. - Altenmann >t 05:31, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
Nice job on the modified table, Incnis Mrsi. It looks even better than the one I proposed above. — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 22:59, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
P.S. Why to refer to a German reprint of Avanesov instead of the original book? It has no new information (even as a republisher's preface), and is not better available now than the original, even in Germany. Moreover, the reference "Avanesov 1975" is somewhat confusing -- a reader may think that it is an improved edition (they do exist, 4th edition of 1968, 6th edition of 1984, but I have none). The reprint can be mentioned only as a possible back-up access method to the original edition.
Why you add parentheses in cases like кто [kto] ('who')? They are superfluous; academical sources use just single quotes. And they create problems if there are another parentheses inside these quotes.
Why to place и/ы topic above all other vowel-related text? It's not more than just a partial question, and therefore must be discussed after more general things: each vowel has its front/back variants, and и/ы is just the case with the most developed and visible distinctions. -- 68.125.55.244 ( talk) 10:55, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Russian is my native language, and some examples looks really funny for me in this article.
1) Some examples are correct, but not common (I've never met such words during my life, but you can really find them in dictionaries, it is very-very special words, or correct but not used forms): гёзы, кяриз, хянга, хэппенинг, сердчишко
2) Some examples use Cyrillic, but it is not Russian, like e.g. кок-сагыз
3) Some examples are totally not correct. These words are wrong: вздлить, встлеть. Photon82 ( talk) 09:53, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Here is stated that in East Slavic languages this sound doesn't appear even as positional variant. There are mentions (I don't know if they are not invented by W-pedians) that some speakers pronounce it before /k/ and /g/, but I think this must be sourced or removed from all Wikipedia (especially from non-linguistic articles as Leningrad). For me, (St. Petersburg native, 26) I pronounce функция somehow like /ˈfunt͡sɪə/. Ignatus ( talk) 21:24, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
Jones (1969) states that Щ is long or short "voiceless palato-alveolar fricative" that is in standard IPA transcription it's /ʃ(ː)/. Ч is т + щ (short) hence it should be /tʃ/.-- Lüboslóv Yęzýkin ( talk) 08:10, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
I recently added some tables of character names in Russian and romanization with accent marks to The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. This should be somewhat helpful to readers, but it would be much more helpful if reduction of unstressed o and e were shown, because English does not consistently reduce o and e to a and i the way standard Russian does. That is, it would be most helpful to transcribe Alekséi Fyódorovich Karamázov as Alikséi Fyódaravich Karamázav and Katerína Ivánovna Verkhóvtseva as Katirína Ivánavna Virkhóvtsyva.
Does anyone know if there's an accepted romanization of Russian, perhaps one used in teaching, that shows vowel reduction in this way (none is listed in that article, at least), or would transcribing vowel reduction in the character names be WP:OR? — Eru· tuon 00:23, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
Could you please add a table that shows how the respective consonantal - but possibly also vocalic - phonemes are represented in writing? Especially those that are sometimes represented by combinations of letters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.206.129.80 ( talk) 03:50, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
I think these words are pronounced as [kəəpʲɪˈrat͡sɨjə] and [səəbrɐˈʐatʲ], unlike what the article says starting at "Adjacent to a hiatus, when the same sound occurs on both sides of the hiatus..." -- Anatoli ( talk) 07:13, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
«Vowels may become voiceless between two voiceless consonants». OK, but none of those 3 examples actually demonstrate it. Moreover, there is a clear distinction between опыт and опт. I can't find dialect-agnostic examples for such devoicing, unless it is a form of relaxed pronounce.
About «Phonological descriptions of /j/ may also classify it as a consonant even in the coda»: after 1970-s modern understanding of /Й/ is as a consonant; before it was considered to be semivowel. So, no diphthongs then.
(More later.) Tacit Murky ( talk) 04:33, 15 May 2016 (UTC)
There is a special case for initial /и/ (including conjunction «и» = and). Since (grammatically) this soft vowel is the only one (of 5 vowel letters), that isn't yotting in the word-starting position, in order to preserve hardness of preceding consonant, it can be changed into /ы/. It's obligatory after always-hard consonants (ш-ж ц) and (apparently) alveolar ones (т-д с-з л н р). Other consonants may be optionally softened:
With that case, we should update vowel allophony table. Tacit Murky ( talk) 23:47, 25 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes, and then there is a case of pseudovowels forming pseudosyllables. This is happening more often than in English because of long consonant clusters. Usually obstruents (/к-г т-д б-п/) act as a semi-syllable bound, forming additional unstressed syllable with sonorant pseudovowel (usually /р л/, less often /н м/): контрпример - кон·тр-при-мер, корабль - ко-ра·бль, ри·тм, рок-н-ролл. Eng. example: battle ['bæ·tl]. Here is a survey with more examples from Russian poetry (where number of syllables have to be preserved to keep poetic metre): джен·тль-мен (verse by Луговский), ок-тя·брь (3 syllables in Pasternak's piece, but 2 in Pushkin's «Осень»), rhyme ру·бль - у-быль (by Саша Чёрный). There are even interjections like кс-кс-кс (to attract a cat, equivalent of «here-kitty-kitty»), where [s] is forming a real syllable (lacking actual vowel); Eng. EQ: «psst!». IMO that's important enough to mention. Tacit Murky ( talk) 17:00 — updated on 18:10, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
The German article mentions the occurrence of automatic phonetic glides between vowels and consonants (and vice versa), similar to the situation in Irish, and this is consistent with my experience – especially a stressed [o] can almost sound like a diphthong [u͡ɔ] (more like [ᵘɔ]). Do RS make no mention of this phenomenon? -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 02:28, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
So, vowel table states that ё for all «CʲV» syllables produce [ɵ]. I'd counter that: Лёля and тёмин may produce [ɵ] (non-iotted counterpart for [o]) in a fast and/or relaxed pronunciation, but that's a «CʲVCʲ» case; meanwhile, Пётр and алё clearly have [o]. So it's like ю case. (Removed about «JV» below…) Tacit Murky ( talk) 23:34, 9 September 2016 (UTC)
I hear a centralized [ɵ] in this recording of Tchaikovsky's name... Maybe o between two iotated consonants is even more front than central? — Eru· tuon 23:48, 9 September 2016 (UTC)
Phoneme | Position | Letter (typically) |
Stressed | Reduced |
---|---|---|---|---|
/a/ | V, CV | а | [ ä, [ ɑ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
CʲV(C) | я | [ ä | [ ɪ | |
CʲVCʲ | [ æ | |||
/o/ | V, CV | о | o̞ ~ ɔ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
CʲV | ё* | [ ɵ | [ ɪ | |
/e/ | CʲV(C) | e | [ ɛ̝ | |
VC | э | [ ɛ | ||
CVC | э, e | [ ɨ̞ | ||
CVCʲ | [ e | |||
/u/ | V, CV | у | [ u | [ ʊ |
CʲV(C) | ю | |||
CʲVCʲ | [ ʉ | [ ʊ̈ | ||
/i/† | V, CʲV | и | [ i | [ ɪ |
/ɨ/† | V, CV | ы, и | [ ɨ | [ ɨ̞ |
* Reduced ⟨ё⟩ is written as ⟨е⟩. † Distinction is disputed. |
Coreydragon replaced line breaks in the table of Russian vowel allophones with table cells. Aeusoes1 reverted, saying that taking out line breaks implied there was variation that is not there. I'm puzzled; Coreydragon's version (which I pasted here) looks okay to me. Could you explain, Aeusoes1? — Eru· tuon 06:27, 10 September 2016 (UTC)
Phoneme | Position | Letter (typically) |
Stressed | Reduced |
---|---|---|---|---|
/a/ | V, CV | а | [ ä, [ ɑ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
CʲV(C) CʲVCʲ |
я | [
ä [ æ |
[ ɪ | |
/o/ | V, CV | о | o̞ ~ ɔ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
CʲV | ё* | [ ɵ | [ ɪ | |
/e/ | CʲV(C) | э, e | [ ɛ̝ | |
VC | [ ɛ | |||
CVC | [ ɨ̞ | |||
CVCʲ | [ e | |||
/u/ | V, CV | у | [ u | [ ʊ |
CʲV(C) CʲVCʲ |
ю | [
u [ ʉ |
[
ʊ [ ʊ̈ | |
/i/† | V, CʲV | и | [ i | [ ɪ |
/ɨ/† | V, CV | ы, и | [ ɨ | [ ɨ̞ |
* Reduced ⟨ё⟩ is written as ⟨е⟩. † Distinction is disputed. |
♦Here's more relevant place for my above-mentioned proposal: in all cases «C» can be any consonant, except Й [j]. Explicit «JV» may produce additional effects (like -йя = [jːə]) apart from implicit iotting like «V» after «V», ь, ъ, «-» and word-initially. Therefore, it may be better to differentiate these cases, when dealing with iotted soft vowels. Tacit Murky ( talk) 13:31, 10 September 2016 (UTC)
♦IMO, it's incorrect to put «э, е» in the same cell. We have 4 cases here:
Note: always-soft й, ч and щ are never followed by э, even in loans. In recent (not fully rusified) words е after consonant is often pronounced as э, just like after always-hard ш, ж, ц: тест (loan), железо (native). But there are no cases where э is pronounced as е (with or without iotting). Hence, we should put a particular letter for at least 2 of 4 rows. Tacit Murky ( talk) 16:45, 10 September 2016 (UTC)
Phoneme | Letter (typically) |
Position | Stressed | Reduced | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
"Letter" and "Position" switched |
/a/ | а | V, CV | [ ä, [ ɑ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
я | CʲV(C) | [ ä | [ ɪ | ||
CʲVCʲ | [ æ | ||||
Letter (typically) |
Phoneme | Position | Stressed | Reduced | |
"Letter" moved all the way to the left |
а | /a/ | V, CV | [ ä, [ ɑ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
я | CʲV(C) | [ ä | [ ɪ | ||
CʲVCʲ | [ æ |
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 |
I have formant values of Russian vowels from Sound Pattern of Russian (1959) and would like to create an image of a vowel chart/trapezium using this information. However, there is no general formant value for these vowels. Instead, consonant vowel (pa, pʲa, va, etc) and vowel consonant (um, upʲ, up etc) sequences, as well as a few example words, are given (You can see most of the relevant appendix in the Google Preview of the book). Averaging all these together wouldn't be a good idea. Instead, we should pick an environment most representative of these vowels. Does anyone have an opinion on what might be the best choice? — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 00:21, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
Dale Chock has argued in this edit summary that Bidwell (1962) is a "maverick, mistake riddled proposal" and that mention of it gives undue weight to a fringe proposal. However, there are two issues that I think complicate the matter.
1. It's my understanding, based on Stankiewicz (1962) that the analysis proposed by Bidwell (1962) is one of a number of similar analyses. While he doesn't provide full citations, Stankiewicz lists six scholars that he says make similar claims:
Similarly, Folejewski lists (also without full citations) of scholars who seem to implicitly adopt an analysis similar to Bidwell's:
I don't think we should remove a paragraph about something broader than Bidwell (1962) simply because of problems with Bidwell. If we had a better understanding of the place that these other scholars (as well as the ones I listed in the archives) have in the general scholarship, it might help us get a better understanding of whether mentioning this analysis really gives undue weight. I have restored the paragraph in question with a POV-section tag to draw others to this discussion.
2. Several editors have alluded (see above and in this archived discussion) to a more robust dispute amongst Russian linguists between a five-vowel analysis (prominent in Moscow schools) and six-vowel analysis (prominent in St. Petersburg) that is, whether ы represents a phoneme or an allophone. I'm not familiar enough with this dispute, but I wouldn't be surprised if the six-vowel analysis also collapses the phonemicity of hard-soft contrasts in ways similar to Bidwell and others. Again, looking into sources would help out in this regard. Either way, I don't think we have enough sourcing present in the article to back up this removal of a citation request, which is why I have restored it. — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 23:23, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
Per this edit, where Dale describes a table as "trivial" and "uninformative," I would have to wholeheartedly disagree. Not only does it show what kinds of clusters are possible in Russian, but it is sourced, coming from a more elaborate table in Halle (1959) that is even duplicated in Chew (2010). Remember that this project is for lay readers who may not have as intuitive an understanding about phonotactics as experts like you and me.
Also, Dale, removals of citation requests like this are inappropriate. In this case, it is a misrepresentation to say that I have requested confirmation that the phrase exists. It only takes a little bit of common sense (and also the ability to read what I wrote in the edit summary when I restored it the last time you deleted it) to know that the citation request is not for the phrase in question, which obviously exists; it is for the claim that it has a five-consonant cluster. Sources I've seen say that Russian has a maximum of four-consonant clusters, and if I felt more confident that I'd read a representative sample on Russian phonotactics I would even mark the claim with a "dubious" tag. Instead, I'm giving you (or other editors) a chance to provide sourcing that states that Russian allows five-consonant clusters. You got it from a source, didn't you? — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 12:01, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
This is in response to the message from AEsos on 12:01, 25 April 2012, regardiing documentation of various lengths of consonant clusters.
I want to open with overall comments about AEsos's editing practices. He fetishizes the criterion of sourcing, believing he is free to insert anything into Wikipedia that complies with the Reliable Source policy. This is self serving, because it's not hard to find a source for something, especially something trivially true. He disregards other criteria. He usually ignores criticisms of his edits entirely. When he doesn't ignore them, his defense is usually limited to "it's sourced" -- which is always beside the point when discussing AEsos editing Wikipedia.
AEsos's approach in editing this issue over five years has been especially goofy because of the incongruity between his making a strong (i.e., remarkable) point that Russian allows four consonants word initially, and his shining the spotlight on the unremarkable shorter clusters.
The bad thing about inserting lists (tabular or otherwise) of examples of clusters of two consonants and of three consonants is that most of the world's languages have words with "clusters" (unbroken sequences) of two consonants. It is Aspergerish to document that English, Russian, or any of thousands of other languages allow sequences of two consonants. The objection that this is a point only plain to "experts" is disingenuous. AEsos also proudly claims his examples are sourced. But you are not supposed to source points of fact which are trivial or which are common knowledge to multitudes of people (there's even a discussion saying so in the Wikipedia policies).
AEsos raises a further objection: we should not assume that the Russian spelling 'k vzglʲadu' is pronounced as written. This objection is no good, because as follows. (1) We do not need to prove that a particular Russian spelling is unrealistic just AEsos, in an attitude of linguistic chauvinism, finds it hard to believe it is realistic. What we would need to prove instead is that a Russian word is NOT pronounced as spelled. Where Russian is not pronounced as spelled, THEN it is appropriate to inform the reader. Indeed, the article already discusses multiple categories of this phenomenon. (2) Furthermore, for AEsos to raise this objection only reaffirms his ignorance of even beginning Russian. By the way, on his User talk page he discloses that he hasn't tried to learn the Russian language, he only studies how it is pronounced and spelled. This after five years of editing "Russian phonology". As I was about to say: in elementary Russian, one learns that the pronunciation of the words 'k', 's', and 'v' has to be expanded to ko, so, vo before some words, as in ko mnʲe. THIS IS INDICATED IN THE NATIVE RUSSIAN SPELLING SYSTEM.
There was a telling incident in this article in 2008. AEsos reverted a fluent speaker on points of vocabulary and grammar! He insisted on a bogus gloss (gorbunʲja means 'hunchback (agentive)') based on a bogus general grammar claim (that an "agentive" meaning is indicated by a suffix -ʲja). Aesos himself originated this misinformation ( Revision as of 22:30, 25 May 2008)). When another editor corrected this on 16 Sept (the word actually means 'female hunchback'), AEsos, in act of complacency and recklessness, reverted, inventing a bogus grammar claim: "female would be gorbuna". Latin and Spanish derive feminine nouns with -a, but Russian doesn't. Only when a native speaker snapped, "Consult a dictionary!" two days later did AEsos fall into line. (Readers can see all this for themselves in the article history.) By the way, this happened at the same time that AEsos had been reverted on basic spelling (e.g., he was ignorant of the simple fact that in Russian spelling, every infinitive ends in a soft sign, except the handful than end in -i!). Aside from ignorance of Russian, let us note one point of ignorance of linguistics. As a linguistic matter, it is makes little sense to conceive of there being an agentive form of a noun denoting a personal quality, like 'tall', 'blond', 'hunchback'. Dale Chock ( talk) 07:37, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
Can anybody provide a list of initial/final consonant clusters of English? I think it would be more interesting to demonstrate only those Russian ones that have no English counterparts. (Say, тк- or рт- would be more interesting than тр-). -- 68.127.102.86 ( talk) 04:07, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
Regarding edits done just within the hour. AEsos has freshly restored POV content that is POV because (1) it overemphasizes morphemes over words; (2) it goes into detail illustrating points that linguists find nonnotable; (3) it reflects AEsos's prejudices.
Number (1) is due to his misunderstanding of the subject dating back to early 2008, when he inserted statements about permissible consonant sequences in Russian words citing Halle 1959. In the four ensuing years, nobody corrected AEsos that Halle meant morphemes, not words. (Of course, in Russian, as in English, many morphemes, like 'dog, tree, talk', can be whole phonological words.) AEsos was giving the misinformation during four years that sequences of four consonants were rare in Russian words because he was ignorant of the meaning of 'morpheme', which is 'word root'. In English, there are many words with four consonants in a row, like 'heartbreak' or 'construct'; note the sequences '-rtbr- and '-nstr'. In fact, in English these sequences are possible within a single phonological word due to compounding of whole words ('heart' plus 'break') or derivation (the affix morpheme 'con-' plus the lexical morpheme '-struct'). This leads us to the relevant point that the same statements are true for Russian. There are LOTS of quadruple consonant clusters in Russian due to affixation or to word compounding. On the other hand, as stated in the article, Russian has only two roots which have four consonants in a row. AEsos dwells on restrictions within morphemes, which are of less significance to linguists than restrictions within words. And he is waging an edit war to keep dwelling on morphemes. He's imposing POV. Morphemes and words usually have different restrictions as to sound structure. In Spanish, for example, words almost never can end in two consonants, and they certainly cannot in two obstruents (fricatives and stops), like in 'want' and 'list' in English. However, Spanish has at least hundreds of morphemes that end in pairs of obstruents, like 'cant-' and 'list-' in words 'canto' and 'listo'. Moreover, as the previous two Spanish words show, the pair '-st-' can freely occur in Spanish words, just not at the end of a word.
Point number (2) is about his two tables, (with example words) of permissible consonant pairs and consonant trios in Russian morphemes. To linguists, this material is trivial, therefore, AEsos is confirming his lack of expertise. Among the world's languages having sequences of two consonants is an ordinary phenomenon, totally nonnotable. What's notable is languages that prohibit two consonants in a row. Moreover, as regards categories of consonant pairs and consonant trios, it is utterly ordinary for them to include 'l, r, w, y' (to use English spelling). What's notable is consonant trios where all three consonants are stops or fricatives.
Point number (3) is about AEsos's insistence on demanding a citation for the quintuple sequence /kvzglʲ/, i.e., that this is pronounced as spelled. Contrary to what he would have us believe, Russian spelling shows Russian pronunciation, except for as noted in reference works. The reference words note MANY exceptions, many of which this article already cites. AEsos's contributions to three articles, including this one, have been discussed ad infinitum on talk pages including this one, and have been proven full of misinformation and lazy copy editing, e.g., where he misspells things and doesn't catch it for four years. But addressing this specific disagreement with him: he doesn't make the same sourcing demand for shorter consonant sequences, in Russian or English. That establishes the English centeredness of his demand. It also proves his failure to notice what all these sources tell him. He cites Cubberley, Halle, Jones & Ward copiously, plus he dabbles in specialist journals. He has inserted dozens of citations. How has he failed to notice where they say that spellings of four or five consonants to start off a word are phonetically unrealistic? The answer is that they don't say it. So for that additional reason -- i.e., the experts offer no admonitions in this regard -- he has no business demanding for this insertion to be sourced. Dale Chock ( talk) 23:55, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
People usually edit Wikipedia outside of a Wikipedia account because they don't expect to participate at length in any one article, or because they want to be naughty or disruptive. Since neither of these describes your participation, I wonder why you haven't created an account at Wikipedia after a couple of dozen or so edits over nearly one month. Although a few of your remarks are constructive, it seems overall like a waste of time to reply to, or try to build on, contributions and comments by someone who doesn't even commit to being an accountable member of the community. I'm curious what you think. Dale Chock ( talk) 05:13, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
Until recent weeks, the article devoted many citations to a single point: which syllable gets the stress in the infinitive of the word for 'to rust'? These footnotes documented that the speakers are split on whether the first syllable or the second.
It turns out this bloated insertion arose from a lingering emotional state that started in 2008. Editor AEsos provided a list of examples to illustrate a category of morphophonological alternation: hard and soft consonants. One example involved this infinitive. At some point, AEsos reverted a native speaker on the pronunciation of this word: specifically, AEsos insisted the word is not pronounced as the native speaker claimed. What a scandalous act! Well, it happens that this word has alternative pronunciations among Russians. So it would also be wrong to claim there is but one correct pronunciation. One day (18 Sep 2008), the native speaker fixed the bad edit. Anyway, ever since, AEsos has been accumulating dictionary citations in order to prove that there are alternative stress patterns. Just one source would do. Well, also in order to prove that one of the pronunciations has been gaining favor with the decades--a point which is equally useless in this particular article.
Originally, I modified this discussion only by reducing the number of dictionaries cited. But actually, it is a poor idea to dwell on sporadic unpredictable or irregular words. Since this particular phenomenon is trivial and also is not invoked to prove any other point in the article, and because of finding out the motivation for all the citations, I have deleted it. Dale Chock ( talk) 11:28, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
I have just restored glosses inserted by at 13:12 30 April 2012 and 10:52 1 May 2012 by Special:Contributions/68.127.102.86. The deletions were done by User:Aeusoes1 at 15:25 1 May with the edit summary, "glosses don't need to be exhaustive". We're talking about a mere nine instances where "68.127.102.86" used 2 to 4 words instead of one word. This is a disgrace, for an ensconced editor to hurry (it was with only a day's delay) to throw water on concise, helpful additions by a new editor. The new editor at least insinuates that he/she is fluent in spoken Russian, which would be a big enhancement to the production of this article.
I consider these deletions an act of hypocrisy on the part of User:Aeusoes1 because since 2008 he has indulged in excesses in exemplification and in sourcing.
(1) He cited 62 instances in a row (in the form of a table) of the alternation between 'e' and 'o'. (2) He cited 17 instances in a row of hard-soft paired consonant alternations. (3) As documented in a section above during this week, he compiled an excessive number of citations of dictionaries over a period of years just to prove that one particular word can be pronounced two ways, and his motivation for this miniproject was he had told a native speaker that speaker's own pronunciation was wrong.
That was as of 27 March 2012. I myself have since thinned these excesses. Dale Chock ( talk) 17:57, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
On 6 May 2012, User talk:aeusoes1 left a long response about these glosses on my user talk page. He didn't explain why not here. From perusing both this page and that response, it doesn't seem like he repeated the parts of that response on this page. That is really something. More than once, he has suggested that a remark I have placed on an article talk page belongs elsewhere. Whether he's right or wrong about that, here I have him NOT placing on an article talk page a comment that cannot be construed any other way than that it is about the insertions in the article! You wonder whether it was a slipup, that he meant to post it here. Anyway, I won't be reading that comment on my talk page. I will read those remarks if they're posted here. Dale Chock ( talk) 05:08, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
"На месте глухих согласных перед звонкими (кроме [в]) произносятся соответствующие звонкие".
Avanesov's pronunciation guide in "Орфоэпический словарь русского языка" (Borunova, Vorontsova, Yes'kova, 1983), p. 670.
Apologies are expected. -- 68.127.102.86 ( talk) 08:12, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
attributed to Lightner 1972. This fact is reinforced by Halle (1959:64):"/v/ and /vʲ/ are unusual in that they seem transparent to voicing assimilation; in the syllable onset, both voiced and voiceless consonants may appear before /v(ʲ)/ . . . When /v(ʲ)/ precedes and follows obstruents, the voicing of the cluster is governed by that of the final segment (per the rule above) so that voiceless obstruents that precede /v(ʲ)/ are voiced if /v(ʲ)/ is followed by a voiced obstruent (e.g. к вдове [ɡ vdɐˈvʲɛ] 'to the widow') . . . ."
That is, in the last case г = [g]; or to put it another way: мог вздохнуть is not pronounced мок вздохнуть. Obviously, the great Avanesov you cite left out an important exception."Note that {v} and {v,} play no independent role. Everything transpires as if {v} and {v,} had been absent; e.g., мог войти [mokvajt,'i] ... мог вернуть, [mokv,ern'ut,] ..., but мог вздохнуть, [mogvzdaxn'ut,]".
So, the observed pronunciation is dual. However, two pronunciation dictionaries make no special exception for this case, thus we have to implicitly suppose that the nearest general rule must be applied (I've cited it above), i.e. the prescribed pronunciation is rather [kvz...] than [gvz...]. -- 68.127.102.86 ( talk) 06:26, 6 May 2012 (UTC)...наблюдение показывает, что перед группами [вб], [вд], [вз] и т. д. у одних говорящих по-русски происходит «озвончение» глухих, у других его не происходит (т. е. у одних невозможны сочетания «глухой согласный + [в] или [в'] + звонкий согласный», а у других возможны). Это — случай, когда «норма... состоит в отсутствии нормы» (Л. В. Щерба). Объяснение очевидно: эти сочетания редкостны, ведь говорится обычно не к вдове, под вздутием, от взвода, а ко вдове, подо вздутием, ото взвода. На стыке же полнозначных слов (идет вдова) вообще законы озвончения менее строги, чем в середине слова...
(My note: the "evident explanation" is not correct, as the Google books' statistics is strictly opposite. Especially in what relates to от(о) взвода: more than 4000 usages of от взвода vs only three (just three, not three thousands) ото взвода, and two of these three are from Panov himself and from a citation of his book.)
The first three were leading authorities in older Russian phonology. The latter two are leading authorities in general phonology from 1970 to at least 2000. Avanesov, Jakobson (Moscow, 1896), and Kiparsky are native speakers (Kiparsky was born and raised abroad, but his father was a Russian Slavicist). Halle and Kiparsky were Jakobson's students. It is ridiculous to suppose all these Russian speakers and linguists missed something M.V. Panov noticed. The paper by Padgett, who is a specialist in Russian phonology, examines some phenomena which are controversial among the specialists. But the phenomenon we are discussing is not controversial. Even if you have understood Panov's opinion perfectly, the most you can insist on is to report his contrarian opinion. Dale Chock ( talk) 13:58, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
To the unregistered new editor, 68.127.102.86, who has been inserting a whole lot of footnotes in the last few hours. Your format is out of compliance with Wikipedia style. Therefore, these edits are going to create a lot of extra work for fellow editors to rectify them. A first stop for learning footnote and bibliography style is WP:Cite. See also WP:Cite book, WP:Cite journal, WP:Cite article, etc.
Beyond formatting of dates, pages and author names, the tone of your wording in footnotes is less encyclopedic than it should be. Phrases like "see" are usually considered too redundant in Wikipedia style. In general, your style is an old fashioned wordier style, which is out of place here. It is even more outdated in having the year late in the citation. The correct sequence in the bibliography is author, year, title.
It is preferable not to put bibliographic citations in footnotes. Instead, just author, year, and page (or chapter or section).
I note that you do not reply to my justifications for edits and reverts stated in edit summaries or on the Talk page. You do not match my reasons with your own, including in your edit summaries. This abruptness makes you edits more liable to being reverted. For example, you insist on talking about "the names of the letters", but the name of Ы is not the bare vowel, in contrast to the case with И. This makes your claim seem to be in disregard of the facts. Another example is your insistence that the Russian education ministry teaches six vowels down to the present, but as you persistently add sources, these additions persistently do not include sources that confirm present day practice. Dale Chock ( talk) 13:10, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Bundling of footnotes. I discovered that Wikipedia enables this while retaining separate hyperlinks. I restored your bundles. Dale Chock ( talk) 10:35, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
I propose do not mention Ostapenko there. She lists some examples (maybe most frequently used ones) and adds "etc." I collected the full set from common dictionaries. With the exception of two occasionalisms, the words are quite common; I believe, any big enough dictionary contains them (or at least similar words with the same prefixes+roots).
The two occasionalisms were found by Google, namely:
I'm not sure whether these links are important enough to be placed in the article. -- 68.127.102.86 ( talk) 15:22, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Twice this week Aesos has been reverted with the allegation by me that a passage is a misquotation of the source. In arrogance, this other editor has blithely restored the disputed passages without explaining how his insertion does not constitute misinformation.
The source, Cubberley p. 82, is unfortunately ambiguous: one cannot be sure of his intended meaning. But logically that means you cannot assume the strong interpretation, as Aesos does. The problem passage in the source is:
"Here we have remnants of older simplifications which occurred as the language shifted from open- to closed-syllable structure. Currently, here as elsewhere, the language is undergoing spelling influence which resists simplification. Some of the groups and words involved are:
(1) by dissimilation." [Here, Cubberley lists some spelled consonant clusters that retain the reduced pronuncation, others that are being "restored" by some speakers.]
"(2) by deletion." [Here, Cubberley lists some words spelled '-vstv-' that retain the simplified pronunciation, others that are being "restored". But, then he lists seven clusters of three or more consonants, which are all dentals or mostly dentals, that underwent simplification, and for none of these seven does Cubberley report any counterexamples.]
Aesos's confusion is to have wrongly extended the scope of the early part of the quotation. Aesos created "counterexamples" that are not clearly affirmed by Cubberley, let alone stated by Cubberley, and it's possible that Cubberley would reject them. Logically, you can't cite a source in support of an insertion that the source does not clearly support. Once again, this other editor misunderstands what he has read--and once again, he doesn't bother to refute arguments against his insertions. In this case, he needs to find an unambiguous source. Dale Chock ( talk) 06:12, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
I've reverted prior to the edit war. Deleting citation requests is not acceptable.
Go ahead and restore the changes that you both agree on. As for the rest, please settle it here. — kwami ( talk) 23:12, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
There is currently a dispute in the article, one that is spread throughout this talk page. This dispute has modified over time as new information is uncovered and edits to the article have accumulated. It is not my intention to document the evolution of the dispute but, rather, focus on the current state of editors' positions. It is my hope that, by centralizing the discussion in one thread, involved editors are more likely to respond to each other and that outside editors considering involvement will not feel the burden of having to read all the conversation that has occurred in the last two months. I will first present the content under dispute, then summarize the most up-to-date arguments for its inclusion, and, finally, provide my own response.
Part 1: The content. The dispute in question is whether Russian phonotactics allows for the pronunciation of clusters with more than four consonants in the syllable onset. Since late April, the article has claimed that it does, though with various changes in wording. Its current form in the article is:
Thus, prepositions (especially the three that consist of just a single consonant: к, с, and в) contribute to phonological words with up to five consonant clusters in the syllable onset. Examples are к взгляду [gvzglʲadu] 'to [the] gaze', к встрече, 'to/for [a, the] meeting', as in 'ready for a meeting'.
Part 2: Arguments for. The quotations below, which are more illustrative than exhaustive, are from Dale Chock, who originally included the claim under dispute and is its primary proponent in this talk page. Since these arguments are located in this talk page, I have not provided links to them. My focus is on just the arguments for the claim in question; other methods of rhetorical persuasion, such as appeals to authority or ad hominem attacks, will not be addressed.
Part 3: Ƶ§œš¹'s responses and rebuttals. The justifications for my position, expanded on below, boil down to this: Russian has well-known patterns of mismatches between orthography and pronunciation, often due to consonant cluster reduction. This, in combination with explicit claims in scholarship of a four-consonant maximum in the syllable onset, prompts me to believe that four consonants are the maximum in the syllable onset, with potentially larger clusters being reduced through deletion and epenthesis (processes that also occur with smaller clusters). I believe it is original research to assume that these claims of a four-consonant maximum are limited to lexical (rather than phonological) words, and I don't believe that the orthographically represented process of epenthesizing ‹о› with prefixes and prepositions can account for Russian speakers' general strategies in dealing with complex onsets.
Points 1 and 2: Inaccuracies in orthographic representations. I do not dispute that Russian has a transparent orthography (Point 1). I also do not dispute the general position of Dale's that the burden is on editors wishing to argue that a given orthographic representation is inaccurate in Russian (point 2). While I have made efforts to fulfill this burden, it seems that it has not yet been convincing. As such, I have taken the effort to search resources available to me to further back up my case that the claim in question (that Russian allows more than four consonants in the syllable onset) requires attribution. Here are my justifications:
Point 3: Affixation and phonological words. To put it bluntly, Dale's edits show a reliance on source synthesis to back up the claim that Russian allows more than four consonants in the syllable onset, a claim that none of the sources cited backs up. WP:SYNTH states:
Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. If one reliable source says A, and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C that is not mentioned by either of the sources.
Here is how the claims present in the article are an OR synthesis of the sources presented:
This shows that, despite the sourcing present, one can't extrapolate the claim in question from the sources given.
In addition, Dale has rephrased the wording of a claim using a source (Ostapenko 2005) that contradicts his claim and cited it to back up claims it does not make. Again, the source in question states: "The possible onset in Russian can be even more complex, as it tolerates up to four consonants at the beginning of the syllable.”
While this statement was used in this article to back up a claim about a four-consonant maximum in the syllable onset, Dale has reworded it to: "Some maintain that there is in fact a systematic four-consonant limitation in the syllable onset of lexical words." This adds extra claims that are not backed up in Ostapenko. Here is the breakdown:
The first bullet point is something that I don't think Dale intended. It seems that he meant to hedge usage of Ostapenko's strong claim about onset limits with weasel wording designed to cast doubt into how representative this view is. Altering the attribution to explicitly state that Ostapenko is meant to be an example of this first bullet point would still not fix this problem; as I have shown above, her view is much more representative than "some maintain" would imply. It would also be original research, as an article's use as an example of meta-claims would be insufficient verification of such meta-claims.
The third bullet point involves Dale assuming in his reading of Ostapenko the very thing he wishes to prove (that there is a difference between onset limits of lexical words and those of phonological words). This false attribution might be more understandable had Ostapenko's examples been composed solely of lexical words. But she used no such lexical examples to reinforce this claim. Even if she had, Dale's wording still introduces novel information that she does not claim and that non-experts—even native speakers of Russian—would not see as obvious.
Point 4: Orthographic representation of epenthesis. Rubach (2000) says (p. 53) that the epenthesized vowel of single-consonant prepositions and prefixes occur when the following onset is a consonant cluster beginning with the same consonant as the preposition (barring voicing distinctions). This backs up Cubberley's (2002) more general statement about geminates in consonant clusters. Importantly, Cubberley (p. 83) states that there are two "lexically specific clusters" that this epenthesis is extended to: мн- ('me') and вс- ('all'). I believe Dale pointed out this process of vowel epenthesis to show that Russian has a method (indicated in the orthography) of dealing with difficult or awkward consonant clusters. However, the environment where these prepositions and prefixes occur with an epenthetic vowel is a very specific one, meant primarily to deal with geminate consonants in clusters and not as a general method of dealing with otherwise difficult consonant clusters.
Like I have already said, it's possible that the sources I have access to provide a skewed presentation of Russian phonotactics, but I have shown that there is reason to doubt the claim of more than four consonants in the syllable onset. This is why I have marked the claim in the article. Editors are welcome to contribute to the discussion, though I ask that you please keep them in the Discussion subsection immediately below. Thank you — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 15:35, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Having been away from the article for a few weeks, it came to my attention only today that on 20 May, Aesos made the following amendment, thereby misidentifying case forms:
BEFORE: Because prepositions in Russian act like clitics, [1] the syntactic phrase of a preposition and a following word constitutes a phonological word that acts like a single grammatical word; e.g., к вдове [ɡvdɐˈvʲɛ] 'to the widow', от вдовы [ɐdvdɐˈvɨ] 'from the widow'. [2] [3] Thus, prepositions (especially the three that consist of just a single consonant: к, с, and в) contribute to phonological words with up to five consonant clusters in the syllable onset. Examples are к взгляду [gvzglʲadu] 'to [the] gaze', к встрече, 'to/for [a, the] meeting', as in 'ready for a meeting'. In the syllable coda, suffixes that contain no vowels may increase the final consonant cluster of a syllable (e.g. Ноябрьск 'city of Noyabrsk' |no'jabrʲ|+|sk| > [nɐ'jabrʲsk]), theoretically up to seven consonants: монстрств ['monstrstf] 'of monsterships'. [4]
AFTER: Because prepositions in Russian act like clitics, [1] the syntactic phrase of a preposition (most notably, the three that consist of just a single consonant: к, с, and в) and a following word constitutes a phonological word that acts like a single grammatical word. [3]
For example, the phrase с друзья́х('with friends') is pronounced [zdrʊˈzʲax].In the syllable coda, suffixes that contain no vowels may increase the final consonant cluster of a syllable (e.g. Ноябрьск 'city of Noyabrsk' |no'jabrʲ|+|sk| > [nɐ'jabrʲsk]), theoretically up to seven consonants: монстрств ['monstrstf] 'of monsterships'. [4]
Against his usual practice, Aesos did not source this boneheaded pairing of a Russian expression and an English gloss (which confuses a gen/loc plural with an instrumental plural). His phonetic transcription wasn't even correct. Where capital 'C' means a consonant, Cья doesn't read [Cʲa], it reads [Cʲja]. The next day, a native speaker corrected the translation error by changing the Russian form to fit the English meaning; but without correcting the error in phonetic transcription.
What a brilliant reinforcement that Aesos only knows isolated sentences that he collects for citations purposes, lacking any true familiarity with his subject. Dale Chock ( talk) 21:31, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
References
re: "was always soft few decades ago" - "few decades ago" must be replaced with absolute time reference. (I hope wikipedia or its content will survive a few more decades :-) - Altenmann >t 09:40, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
The recent edits by the anonymous editor added some good information, though the tables didn't work very well, in my opinion. I think the problem is that there are so many words in them that they don't do a good job of quickly summarizing information. Perhaps, instead of replacing the prose, we can add simplified tables to augment it. For example:
Phoneme | Position | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
V(C) | VCʲ | CV(C) | CVCʲ | CʲV(C) | CʲVCʲ | |
/a/ | [a] | [æ] | ||||
/o/ | [o] | [ɵ̞] | [ɵ̞] | |||
/u/ | [u] | [ʉ] | ||||
/e/ | [ɛ̝] | [e] | [ɛ̠] | [e̠] | [ɛ̝] | [e] |
/i/ | [i], [ɨ] | [ɨ] | [i] | [i̝] |
If we do want that last column with some comments, they should be short.
A couple of other things
Let me know if I've accidentally removed citations or information in the process of removing the tables and touching up the article. I believe I kept it all in there, but I may have missed something. — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 15:40, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
re: " only soft [dʲ] appears before soft [lʲ] " -- this is quite wrong. длина подлец для all have hard 'd' . In fact, I have difficulties to think of the opposite. - Altenmann >t 05:31, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
Nice job on the modified table, Incnis Mrsi. It looks even better than the one I proposed above. — Ƶ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 22:59, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
P.S. Why to refer to a German reprint of Avanesov instead of the original book? It has no new information (even as a republisher's preface), and is not better available now than the original, even in Germany. Moreover, the reference "Avanesov 1975" is somewhat confusing -- a reader may think that it is an improved edition (they do exist, 4th edition of 1968, 6th edition of 1984, but I have none). The reprint can be mentioned only as a possible back-up access method to the original edition.
Why you add parentheses in cases like кто [kto] ('who')? They are superfluous; academical sources use just single quotes. And they create problems if there are another parentheses inside these quotes.
Why to place и/ы topic above all other vowel-related text? It's not more than just a partial question, and therefore must be discussed after more general things: each vowel has its front/back variants, and и/ы is just the case with the most developed and visible distinctions. -- 68.125.55.244 ( talk) 10:55, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Russian is my native language, and some examples looks really funny for me in this article.
1) Some examples are correct, but not common (I've never met such words during my life, but you can really find them in dictionaries, it is very-very special words, or correct but not used forms): гёзы, кяриз, хянга, хэппенинг, сердчишко
2) Some examples use Cyrillic, but it is not Russian, like e.g. кок-сагыз
3) Some examples are totally not correct. These words are wrong: вздлить, встлеть. Photon82 ( talk) 09:53, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Here is stated that in East Slavic languages this sound doesn't appear even as positional variant. There are mentions (I don't know if they are not invented by W-pedians) that some speakers pronounce it before /k/ and /g/, but I think this must be sourced or removed from all Wikipedia (especially from non-linguistic articles as Leningrad). For me, (St. Petersburg native, 26) I pronounce функция somehow like /ˈfunt͡sɪə/. Ignatus ( talk) 21:24, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
Jones (1969) states that Щ is long or short "voiceless palato-alveolar fricative" that is in standard IPA transcription it's /ʃ(ː)/. Ч is т + щ (short) hence it should be /tʃ/.-- Lüboslóv Yęzýkin ( talk) 08:10, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
I recently added some tables of character names in Russian and romanization with accent marks to The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. This should be somewhat helpful to readers, but it would be much more helpful if reduction of unstressed o and e were shown, because English does not consistently reduce o and e to a and i the way standard Russian does. That is, it would be most helpful to transcribe Alekséi Fyódorovich Karamázov as Alikséi Fyódaravich Karamázav and Katerína Ivánovna Verkhóvtseva as Katirína Ivánavna Virkhóvtsyva.
Does anyone know if there's an accepted romanization of Russian, perhaps one used in teaching, that shows vowel reduction in this way (none is listed in that article, at least), or would transcribing vowel reduction in the character names be WP:OR? — Eru· tuon 00:23, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
Could you please add a table that shows how the respective consonantal - but possibly also vocalic - phonemes are represented in writing? Especially those that are sometimes represented by combinations of letters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.206.129.80 ( talk) 03:50, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
I think these words are pronounced as [kəəpʲɪˈrat͡sɨjə] and [səəbrɐˈʐatʲ], unlike what the article says starting at "Adjacent to a hiatus, when the same sound occurs on both sides of the hiatus..." -- Anatoli ( talk) 07:13, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
«Vowels may become voiceless between two voiceless consonants». OK, but none of those 3 examples actually demonstrate it. Moreover, there is a clear distinction between опыт and опт. I can't find dialect-agnostic examples for such devoicing, unless it is a form of relaxed pronounce.
About «Phonological descriptions of /j/ may also classify it as a consonant even in the coda»: after 1970-s modern understanding of /Й/ is as a consonant; before it was considered to be semivowel. So, no diphthongs then.
(More later.) Tacit Murky ( talk) 04:33, 15 May 2016 (UTC)
There is a special case for initial /и/ (including conjunction «и» = and). Since (grammatically) this soft vowel is the only one (of 5 vowel letters), that isn't yotting in the word-starting position, in order to preserve hardness of preceding consonant, it can be changed into /ы/. It's obligatory after always-hard consonants (ш-ж ц) and (apparently) alveolar ones (т-д с-з л н р). Other consonants may be optionally softened:
With that case, we should update vowel allophony table. Tacit Murky ( talk) 23:47, 25 July 2016 (UTC)
Yes, and then there is a case of pseudovowels forming pseudosyllables. This is happening more often than in English because of long consonant clusters. Usually obstruents (/к-г т-д б-п/) act as a semi-syllable bound, forming additional unstressed syllable with sonorant pseudovowel (usually /р л/, less often /н м/): контрпример - кон·тр-при-мер, корабль - ко-ра·бль, ри·тм, рок-н-ролл. Eng. example: battle ['bæ·tl]. Here is a survey with more examples from Russian poetry (where number of syllables have to be preserved to keep poetic metre): джен·тль-мен (verse by Луговский), ок-тя·брь (3 syllables in Pasternak's piece, but 2 in Pushkin's «Осень»), rhyme ру·бль - у-быль (by Саша Чёрный). There are even interjections like кс-кс-кс (to attract a cat, equivalent of «here-kitty-kitty»), where [s] is forming a real syllable (lacking actual vowel); Eng. EQ: «psst!». IMO that's important enough to mention. Tacit Murky ( talk) 17:00 — updated on 18:10, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
The German article mentions the occurrence of automatic phonetic glides between vowels and consonants (and vice versa), similar to the situation in Irish, and this is consistent with my experience – especially a stressed [o] can almost sound like a diphthong [u͡ɔ] (more like [ᵘɔ]). Do RS make no mention of this phenomenon? -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 02:28, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
So, vowel table states that ё for all «CʲV» syllables produce [ɵ]. I'd counter that: Лёля and тёмин may produce [ɵ] (non-iotted counterpart for [o]) in a fast and/or relaxed pronunciation, but that's a «CʲVCʲ» case; meanwhile, Пётр and алё clearly have [o]. So it's like ю case. (Removed about «JV» below…) Tacit Murky ( talk) 23:34, 9 September 2016 (UTC)
I hear a centralized [ɵ] in this recording of Tchaikovsky's name... Maybe o between two iotated consonants is even more front than central? — Eru· tuon 23:48, 9 September 2016 (UTC)
Phoneme | Position | Letter (typically) |
Stressed | Reduced |
---|---|---|---|---|
/a/ | V, CV | а | [ ä, [ ɑ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
CʲV(C) | я | [ ä | [ ɪ | |
CʲVCʲ | [ æ | |||
/o/ | V, CV | о | o̞ ~ ɔ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
CʲV | ё* | [ ɵ | [ ɪ | |
/e/ | CʲV(C) | e | [ ɛ̝ | |
VC | э | [ ɛ | ||
CVC | э, e | [ ɨ̞ | ||
CVCʲ | [ e | |||
/u/ | V, CV | у | [ u | [ ʊ |
CʲV(C) | ю | |||
CʲVCʲ | [ ʉ | [ ʊ̈ | ||
/i/† | V, CʲV | и | [ i | [ ɪ |
/ɨ/† | V, CV | ы, и | [ ɨ | [ ɨ̞ |
* Reduced ⟨ё⟩ is written as ⟨е⟩. † Distinction is disputed. |
Coreydragon replaced line breaks in the table of Russian vowel allophones with table cells. Aeusoes1 reverted, saying that taking out line breaks implied there was variation that is not there. I'm puzzled; Coreydragon's version (which I pasted here) looks okay to me. Could you explain, Aeusoes1? — Eru· tuon 06:27, 10 September 2016 (UTC)
Phoneme | Position | Letter (typically) |
Stressed | Reduced |
---|---|---|---|---|
/a/ | V, CV | а | [ ä, [ ɑ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
CʲV(C) CʲVCʲ |
я | [
ä [ æ |
[ ɪ | |
/o/ | V, CV | о | o̞ ~ ɔ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
CʲV | ё* | [ ɵ | [ ɪ | |
/e/ | CʲV(C) | э, e | [ ɛ̝ | |
VC | [ ɛ | |||
CVC | [ ɨ̞ | |||
CVCʲ | [ e | |||
/u/ | V, CV | у | [ u | [ ʊ |
CʲV(C) CʲVCʲ |
ю | [
u [ ʉ |
[
ʊ [ ʊ̈ | |
/i/† | V, CʲV | и | [ i | [ ɪ |
/ɨ/† | V, CV | ы, и | [ ɨ | [ ɨ̞ |
* Reduced ⟨ё⟩ is written as ⟨е⟩. † Distinction is disputed. |
♦Here's more relevant place for my above-mentioned proposal: in all cases «C» can be any consonant, except Й [j]. Explicit «JV» may produce additional effects (like -йя = [jːə]) apart from implicit iotting like «V» after «V», ь, ъ, «-» and word-initially. Therefore, it may be better to differentiate these cases, when dealing with iotted soft vowels. Tacit Murky ( talk) 13:31, 10 September 2016 (UTC)
♦IMO, it's incorrect to put «э, е» in the same cell. We have 4 cases here:
Note: always-soft й, ч and щ are never followed by э, even in loans. In recent (not fully rusified) words е after consonant is often pronounced as э, just like after always-hard ш, ж, ц: тест (loan), железо (native). But there are no cases where э is pronounced as е (with or without iotting). Hence, we should put a particular letter for at least 2 of 4 rows. Tacit Murky ( talk) 16:45, 10 September 2016 (UTC)
Phoneme | Letter (typically) |
Position | Stressed | Reduced | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
"Letter" and "Position" switched |
/a/ | а | V, CV | [ ä, [ ɑ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
я | CʲV(C) | [ ä | [ ɪ | ||
CʲVCʲ | [ æ | ||||
Letter (typically) |
Phoneme | Position | Stressed | Reduced | |
"Letter" moved all the way to the left |
а | /a/ | V, CV | [ ä, [ ɑ | [ ə, [ ɐ |
я | CʲV(C) | [ ä | [ ɪ | ||
CʲVCʲ | [ æ |