Re: Russian

On Fri, 18 Aug 2000 23:08:23 +0300, Markus Miekk-oja <torpet@...>
wrote:

>could anyone post a list (ascii-ipa) of Russian phonemes?
Vowels (stressed): a o u i (I) e

The only reason to consider [I] a phoneme is the name of the letter
denoting this sound (plus a couple of extremely rare Turkish and
Estonian placenames) where this vowel appears word-initially. Otherwise
it's a variant of [i] following a 'hard' (non-palatalized) consonant.

I don't touch unstressed vowels here, too much commenting needed...

Consonants:

'hard'  'soft'  letter

  b       b'      be
  p       p'      pe
  m       m'      em
  v       v'      ve
  f       f'      ef
  d       d'      de
  t       t'      te
  n       n'      en
  r       r'      er
  l       l'      el
 (d_z)    -       (tse+ze or de+ze, in interjections and loanwords)
  t_s     -       tse
  z       z'      ze
  s       s'      es
  -      t_S'     che
  Z               zhe
        (Z:')     (ze+zhe, zhe+de or double zhe in certain words; old norm)
  S               sha
         S:'      shcha (also es+che, sha+che, etc.)
  -      j        iotified vowels, 'i kratkoe' when no vowel follows
  g      g'       ge
  k      k'       ka
 (G)     (G')     (ge in some Church Slavonic words; old norm)
  x      x'       xa

>The teacher's explanations of how a sound is pronounced are
>not intended for someone who is a conlanger...
I imagine a new book series: "<...> Language for Conlangers, in Two
Hours" ;)


Basilius