Re: OT: Russian and Ukrainian (was: Re: semi-OT: bilingual communication)

Isaac wrote:

> <<I'm taking my first year of
> Russian language (ja uc^u inostrannye jazyki i literatury v milanskom
> universitete, v severnoj Italii;-)>>
>
> Oc^en' choros^o! Napisano bez os^ibok!
Spasibo;-)

> <<I knew Ukrainian shifts Russian /O/ to /i/ (or /M/, perhaps)>>
>
> No-no. It's clear /i/. In contrast to other kinds of /i/, in some dialects
(for
> instance, in my wife's Poltava d.), it doesn't cause palatalization of the
> preceding consonant. It was a literary norm till 1930's when it started
being
> treated as "counterrevolutionary" and was abandoned.
> Compare Ru. [sok] "juice" :: Uk. [s_jik] :: Uk.(Polt.d.) [sik] in contrast
to
> Ru. [s_jok] "he lashed" :: Uk. [s_jik].
Has your wife's dialect a phonemic opposition between /i/ and /M/ (whereas
these are generally considered allophones in Russian, occurring the former
after palatalized consonants, the latter after plain consonants)? What's
their status in Std. Ukrainian?

> <<under
> certain conditions I fail to remember: Ru.: nos, Uk.: nis, >>
The masculine gen.pl. ending is -iv, IIRC...

Just a couple of questions:

1) did Ukrainian realize the palatalization of /M/ after velars as Russian
did? I was listening to radio Svoboda [svO'bOda] (I can understand only
scattered words, so far... but it's already a great success when I
understand wheter they're speaking Russian, Belarusian or Ukrainian;-) and I
heard "Kiev" pronounced something like [kMw], or [kMjew]... I've seen the
name written _Kyev"_ ("= tvërdyj znak) in the _Slovo o polku Igoreve_, and
that pronounciation suggests the palatalization didn't occur...

2) is there any Akanie phenomenon? [svO'bOda] and your exemple (molodyj =
[mOlO'dIj]) make me think there is not, but I thought that was a
characteristic feature of Souther East Slavic (there's no Akanie in Northern
Russian dialects, AFAIK).

> <<Where exactly do you live and study, Isaac?>>
>
> I live and *work* in Kiev, I teach English and Basic Hebrew. If you need
more
> info about Ukrainian, contact me privately at isaacp(at)ukr(dot)net.
That must be a professional bias;-) I'm going to have my first university
exams this week...

Luca