Initial clusters, was: Re: Russian orthography

On Tue, 1 Feb 2000 11:52:22 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<Christophe.Grandsire@...> wrote:

>At 12:52 31/01/00 -0500, you wrote:
>>
>>V yuzhyi kray [vjúZnyj kraj] 'to (a/the) southern land'
>>vs.
>>V'yuzhnyi kray [v'júZnyj kraj] '(a/the) land of snowstorms'.
>>
>
>        Can you make a little transliteration of those two phrases? It's
rather
>interesting.
_v_  VE (separate word)

_yuzhnyi_: YU + ZHE + EN + Y + I KRATKOE

_v'yuzhnyi_: VE + SOFT SIGN + YU + ZHE + EN + Y + I KRATKOE

_KRAY_: KA + ER + A + I KRATKOE in both examples

If you can see KOI-8 RU or Win-1251 on your machine, I can give this in
the native orthography

>        I have to learn Russian! I've always been impressed by those
>one-consonnant prepositions. How do you pronounce them in front of a
>consonnant cluster?
If you are interested in really difficult clusters, learn Polish!

E. g. (the encoding must be Central European: ISO-8859-2,
in brackets I give same words with diacritics omitted):

w¿dy (wzdy) 'always': v + Z + d
kszta³t (ksztalt) 'breed, education, conduct': k + S + t
 (an old borrowing from German: Gestalt)
d¿d¿ysty (dzdzysty) 'rainy': d + Z + d_Z; note that d + Z and d_Z do differ
ŸdŸb³o (zdzblo) 'stalk': Z' + d_Z' + b + w
pszczo³a (pszczola) 'bee': p + S + t_S

With all this, I found Polish rather elegant ;)

In Russian, there are also some examples to entertain you:

vstrecha 'meeting': f + s + t + r'
k vstreche 'to (the) meeting': k + f + s + t + r'


Basilius