Sounds 81

The overall view is that vowels have duration, especially in proportion to stress, and offer duration to surrounding consonants. Consonants consume derivation. Sonorants are more or less neutral; they extend the domain of vowels.

2.4.4 Phonological variation: phonostylistics and Old Muscovite pronunciation

For most processes in which there is variation, variants are correlated with different stylistic values: characteristically one variant will be evaluated as conservative and explicit, the other as more casual; variation may be correlated with tempo as well. Moreover, as the sociolinguistic investigations of the 1960s documented repeatedly, the conservative variant is the variant preferred (in statistical terms) by the higher social classes, while the innovative, casual variant is that used (by a statistical margin) by workers.

There is a collection of unconnected phonological traits that have been identified in Russian phonological literature as “Old Muscovite” features, features dating back to the residual population of Moscow before the October Revolution of 1917. For the most part, they have been overridden by the national norms of twentieth-century Russian.95

Some Old Muscovite features are the following. In vocalism, a more open vowel, conventionally transcribed [ ], is used for non-high vowels after hard consonants in first pretonic position rather than [ ]: cnjkß [st l˝!]. Velars in the nominative singular masculine of adjectives remained hard, and after them atonic [ə] is used (nz´;rbq ‘difficult’ [kə8i]); in this instance the Old Muscovite pronunciation is more original; the national norm of [k˛] in such adjectives is a spelling pronunciation. The imperfectivizing suffix begins with [ə] (again, without palatalizing a velar) rather than [ï]. Pervasive use of [ï] for orthographic ≤f≥ after ≤i≥ and ≤;≥ is Old Muscovite.

In consonantism, maintenance of [z˛] in lhj´;;b ‘yeast’ and the like is Old

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Muscovite. In Old Muscovite pronunciation, a palatalized [r˛] used to occur in the position after {e} before a following consonant. This ancient pronunciation (it derives from a progressive palatalization of the r in CimrCj sequences when Cj was not a hard dental) occurred in words such as d†h[ [v˛öör˛x† ] ‘top’, g†hdsq [pöör˛vïi8† ] ‘first’. Old Muscovite had prevalent spirantization of stops in clusters: in lexical items yj´unb ‘nails’ OM [xt˛], rnj´ ‘who’ OM [xt], rjulƒ ‘when’ OM [ d], and even in combinations of prefixes and lexemes, r lj´ve OM [ d] ‘to the building’.

Long ago, [c˛] lost closure before [n] and was reinterpreted as hard [s]. This [sn]
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is still maintained in certain high-frequency lexical items such as rjy†xyj ‘of course’ and créxyj ‘boring’, but in general this pronunciation is receding in

favor of the new national norm, [c˛n]. Thus, older speakers have [sn] in ,ékjxyfz
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95 See Shapiro 1968, Matusevich 1976, Panov 1990.