Re: Russian orthography (was: A perfect day ...)

Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:58:31 +0100 Christophe Grandsire
<Christophe.Grandsire@...> wrote:

> Do you mean that in your patronimic name, the palatal n' is followed by
> the approximant /j/?
I think /j/ is rather tense here. World-initially and after another
consonant it sounds more like a spirant.

> I don't know if I could make any difference between
> the cluster /n'j/ and a simple /n'/ (I can make a difference between /n'/
> and /nj/, but /n'j/ is to difficult for me I think).
Maybe, the matter is that you tend to palatalize consonants before /j/.
Non-palatalized ('hard') consonants are clearly velarized in Russian
(I think more or less like dentals in American English), also before /j/.

In general, Russian distinguishes all possible combinations: /C/, /C'/,
/Cj/, /C'j/.

The combination /n'j/ is an easy one, since /n'/ is a dental. To give
you a funnier example, with labials: I clearly distinguish in my
pronunciation /vj/ and /v'j/, as e. g. in:

V yuzhyi kray [vjúZnyj kraj] 'to (a/the) southern land'
vs.
V'yuzhnyi kray [v'júZnyj kraj] '(a/the) land of snowstorms'.

> Or maybe phonetically we still have palatalized consonnants in words like
> 'mien' (mine) /m'E~/ or /mjE~/? I think I pronounce more the first one,
but
> I'm pretty sure I heard the last one too.
Yes, to my Russian ear French consonants sound palatalized before /j/, and
maybe slightly palatalized before /i/. Besides, French velars seem to be
palatalized before any front vowel and word-finally after /i/. Very
different from English: even the initial cluster in 'new' sounds to me
rather as [n]+[j], without palatalization on [n].


Vasiliy Chernov
AKA Basilius