Re: USAGE: East Slavic historical phonology (was: Questions and Impressions of Basque)

Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 05:43:39PM +0300, Isaac A. Penzev wrote:
> > No. It is [h\] - a VOICED glottal fricative.
>
> Huh, never encountered that before.  So [h\] : [h] :: [G] : [x], yes?
Yes.

> I find it hard to get my vocal cords vibrating for [h\]; the extra force
> required turns it into [G] . . .
It's pretty a frequent consonant in Ukrainian. It can play a shibbolet for a
furriner. As well as the word [pal;a"nIts);a] 'a loaf of white bread'. Yes,
it has a *palatalized* (sic!) fore-tongue (dental) affricate (side-note: all
fore-tongue consonants are dental, not alveolar in Ukr.) And Muscovites
trying to pronounce it, always end with smth like [pVl;i"n;its)@]. Brrhhh.

-------------------
Philippe Caquant wrote:

> Oh ? Eto ja ne znal. Thought all names ending with
> -pol were of same origin.
No, they aren't.

> I didn't wonder about
> Simferopol, but I thought Sebastopol is still
> pronounced Sebastopol
_Sevastopol'_, not with /b/. Pronounced as [s;ivV"stop@l;] in Russian,
[seva"stOpOl;] in Ukrainian.

> because it's more a Russian town
> than an Ukrainian one (don't hit me !)
Should I use a performative verb instead? LOL...

-------------------
Philippe Caquant also wrote in different msg:

> My wife says that at school, she learned Ukrainian
> without hearing about "hard g".
She may have been not attentive. We learnt (in Donbass, in 1975!) the list
of words with /g`/ (I mean [g]), tho it was written as plain /g/ [h\] then.

> After 1991, it came
> back a little.
Indeed.

> I have a Ukrainian-French-Ukrainian dictionary,
> printed in 1996. There this "hard g" can be found. It
> gives hardly 20 words starting with it. Among them:
[skip the list]

There is a word _ag`rus_ 'gooseberry' with "hard g" inside. Other popular
word to illustrate the sound is _g`udzyk_ 'button'.

Btw, there are minimal pairs:
_g`raty_ ["g4ate] 'grate', 'bars' ~ _graty_ ["h\4ate] 'to play'
and
_g`nit_ ["gnit] 'candlewick' ~ _gnit_ ["h\n;it] "opperssion"

> There seems also to be a first name "Ganzja" starting
> with that letter.
AFAIK no. But family names ending in -g`a, yes. E.g. _Sapeg`a_.

> Krym is
> really an interesting place for toponyms.
Yes, taking into account that after "replacement" of Qirim Tatars in 1944
most of Tatar place names were substituted by smth else.

--------------------
Andreas Johansson wrote:

> > It's really a mistery to, how such different sounds as
> > 'i' and 'o' can be used alternatively in similar words
> > between Russian and Ukrainian.
>
> Well, it's not too hard to imagine a sound change o>u>y>i or o>@>I>i.
I need to consult my sister-in-law (she studied History of Ukr. lang at the
Uni), but IIRC the was an intermediate diphthongization stage, smth like
o>uo>y2>y@>y>i. This happened only under ceratin stress conditions in
blocked syllables, so not all /o/ turned into /i/. But this gave Ukr. [i]
sound, since all Slavic *i and *i\ merged into /I/!

> Unfortunately, to my ears, German and Swedish has each two quite distinct
'i'
> sounds, as does English. The vowels in the initial syllables of _Ihre_ and
> _Irre_ differ as much by quality as by quantity ([i:] vs [I];
approximately the
> same as English "feel" vs "fill"). If the Russian vowel is closer to the
vowel
> of _Irre_, the connection doesn't really work at all.
Russian has only [i] (but short), and it is "soft" (that is palatalizing the
preceding consonant). It's "hard" variant is [i\]. But phone*m*icly
speaking, there is only /i/ phoneme in Russian; the opposition relies on
palatalization of the consonant: [bi\5] 'he was' ~ [b;i5] 'he was beating'
is in fact /bil/ vs. /b;il/. As for Ukrainian, it has /i/ ~ /I/ phonemic
opposition due to the processes described above.

-- Yitzik