Re: glottals

As I understand, it seems that there cannot be any
possible confusion in Russian if you pronounce hard-L
and soft-L the same way. Hard-L can only be before a,
o, and soft-L before e, i, ja (and I can't remember
what's before u; probably some more cases too). If
there is a hard-L in the word Lochad' (Horse), there
isn't any other word like lochad' (with soft-l), so
the difference is not relevant for understanding
what's being said. I always learned that phonemes are
defined by distinction. French "on" is different from
"an" or "en", because there are words like "ton",
"thon" (tõ), and words like "tant", "temps" (tã), and
it is impossible to confuse "tant" and "ton" if you
pronounce them the "right" way.

But In Russian, it seems that it won't be of any help
to distinguish between hard-L and soft-l, this will
never allow you to make a distinction between two
different words. (So why losing one's time, except in
case of a spy trying to make people think he is
Russian while he's not).


--- Pavel Iosad <edricson@...> wrote:
> Wow. The non-palatalized /l/ is [5], a world of
> difference from [l_j].
> No wonder pronouncing it as [l] immediately betrays
> you :)
>
> Pavel
> --
> Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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