Re: OT: Russian in ASCII?

Mark J. Reed scripsit:

> Russian has two <i> sounds, long and short.  Both are represented
> in Cyrillic by a letter that looks like a backwards Roman capital N
> (?? if you have Unicode), but the short one has a breve over it
> (the same flattened-U symbol used to indicate "short" vowels in
> English dictionaries): ??.
Short in the sense that it forms the off-glide of a diphthong with
the preceding vowel.  Note that -iy is usually transliterated simply
-y in Latin, but is written with two letters in Cyrillic.

> Russian also has another i-like vowel, called [jeru], whose Cyrillic
> representation looks like bI (??).  It's a high vowel and I think
> it's really a diphthong with an offglide, but I don't know exactly
> how to represent it phonetically even though I can reproduce it
> faithfully.
It is [1] in X-SAMPA, and is the vowel Western North American anglophones
use in "just".

> Additionally, there are two letters which are silent but palatalize or
> de-palatalize the preceding consonant, called the "soft sign" and
> "hard sign" respectively.  The soft sign (mjakij znak) looks like a small
> lowercase b, or musical flat (??), while the hard sign (tvjordij znak) is
> the same with a half-crossbar on top to the left (? ).
The hard sign is used only when a j-bearing vowel follows.  There is a
four-way opposition CV / C;V / CjV / C;jV, written with a hard vowel,
a soft vowel, a hard sign + soft vowel, and a soft sign + soft vowel
respectively; soft sign is also used finally to mark a palatalized
final consonant.

> Also, Russian spelling is not completely phonemic, in that there are places
> where the preceding consonant is not palatalized despite being followed by
> a palatalizing vowel.  And some consonants are simply never palatalized at
> all.
A few consonants likewise are always palatalized.  The always-p and
never-p consonants are conventionally followed by a je i o u only,
which are in some sense the unmarked forms, never by ja e y jo ju.

> Finally, there is a typographical oddity in that the palatalizing
> O is visually the same letter as the palatizing E with a diaresis
> (two dots above) added.
Not just typographical: jo is closely related to je grammatically.

--
John Cowan                              <jcowan@...>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              http://www.reutershealth.com
Unified Gaelic in Cyrillic script!
        http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Celticonlang

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