Re: Czech orthography (was Re: Lack of ambiguity in Czech, was Re: EU allumettes)

On 7 May 2004 Javier BF <uaxuctum@...> wrote:
> In practice, a semiconsonant [j] is inserted between the consonant
> and the vowel (thus, me^ sounds like mje)
On 8 Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...> wrote:
> I really wanted to say was that I've also heard the sequence
> sequence "me^" sounded as [mne], rather than [mje]
  In fact, the glide is nazalized before m in standard
pronunciation, therefore me^ sounds like X-Sampa [mJe]. However,
[mje] is also possible as a substandard-dialectal variant.


> Czech uses "e caron" where Polish spelling uses the digraph "ie",
> and I suppose it corresponds to one of the pre-Revolutionary
> Russian "e" letters too ("e" itself, I suppose).
  The latter is called yat /jat'/. It was written in Cyrillic
script as "soft sign" (myahki znak) with a long, barred leg (see
Unicode U+0463 for lowercase, U+0462 for uppecase variant). It's
true, it was removed from the Russian alphabet in 1917, but it
existed in Bulgarian orthography until 1945 (roughly, it was
written where /ja/ ~ /e/ alternation takes place in modern
language).

  The yat was originally the long variant of /e/ in Old Slavic but
later became a diphtongue /je/ in some languages or open
"palatalizing" /'{/ (~ /'E/) in others. The changes of yat is one
of the "classical topics" of the comparative slavistics.

  Czech e^ derives from various sources: from the Old Slavic yat
you mentioned, but even from the diphtonguization of long /e:/'s
developed in Czech (This /e:/ could be a result of a metaphony from
previous /'a:, 'o:/, of the denasalization of front nasal vowels
etc.)


On 7 May 2004 Danny Wier <dawiertx@...> wrote:
> letters: C, D, E, L, N, R, S, T, Z. But in the case of D, L and T
  L with caron exists only in Slovak, in Czech L is always "hard".
(The palatalized /l'/ tends to disappear even in Slovak, because
it's pronounced only in central and eastern dialects, and the
capital, the modern normative center, lies in the western dialectal
area.)