Re: OT: Russian in ASCII?

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 12:19:17PM -0500, Robert Jung wrote:
>    Could someone please explain the Russian phonology (all of it)? I have no
>    idea what "i-breve", "ya/ye/yo", "je", "'" etc. etc. etc. mean. It's just
>    so confusing to me!
Okay, let's hit the highlights first.

Russian has two <i> sounds, long and short.  Both are represented
in Cyrillic by a letter that looks like a backwards Roman capital N
(И 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): Й.

Russian also has another i-like vowel, called [jeru], whose Cyrillic
representation looks like bI (ы).  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.

The other stuff is all about palatalization, which features heavily in
Russian and accounts for a fair chunk of the Cyrillic alphabet.  For
instance, for vowels other than the above, there are two complete series
of letters.  Each pair of letters represents the same vowel sound, but one
additionally indicates  that the preceding consonant should be palatalized.
For example, the Russian word for "no" is spelled with the Cyrillic
equivalents of N-E-T; the [j] sound indicated by the usual American
spelling "nyet" is actually palatalization of the N, which is indicated by
the letter used to represent the E.    And it is not consistent with
respect to Cyrillic/Latin similarity; the letter which looks just like
a Latin E indicates palatalization, while the letters that look just like
Latin A and O do not.

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 (ь), while the hard sign (tvjordij znak) is
the same with a half-crossbar on top to the left (� ).

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.

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.

So some issues in transliteration are these:

1. Palatalization.  How do you indicate it?  Do you use <j> or <y>?
   If you want to faithfully reproduce the Cyrillic spelling, you also have
   to distinguish palatalization  that is implicit in the letter from that
   which is explicit via a soft sign.  An apostrophe is often used for
   the latter.

2. What does <e> represent?  You have two E letters in Cyrillic,
   three if you want visual similarity for the palatalizing O sound;
   how do you get that out of the single Roman letter?   And do you
   use a visual mapping, where a bare <e> is palatalizing, just like
   the bare Cyrillic E is?  Or a phonemic transcription where bare <e>
   is non-palatalizing and you put a <j> or <y> in front of it?

3. The three I-ish vowels.  How do you represent short i and yeru?
   Usually <j> and <y> are chosen, but you have to avoid ambiguity with
   palatalization.

-Mark

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