2

Sounds

2.1 Sounds

Sounds are pronounced in different ways -- in one context as opposed to another, from one occasion to the next, from one speaker to another. From these different pronunciations in the flow of speech, over the occasions of speech, and across speakers, regular gestures and regular acoustic patterns can be abstracted. The units derived by idealizing in this way will be written here in square brackets.1 In Russian as in other languages, sounds can be classified into vowels (stressed [ƒ], unstressed [´], etc.) and consonants, which include obstruents -- sounds made with a significant obstruction of the air flow (such as [t], [z˛]) -- and sonorants (such as the nasal [n], the liquid [l˛], the glide [j]).

Russian phonology revolves primarily around two concerns: stress in vowels and palatalization in consonants.2

Palatalization is an articulation of a consonant in which the blade of the tongue moves toward the hard palate. For example, when the non-palatalized “l” sound of w†k (w†ksq) ‘whole’ is pronounced, the tip of the tongue touches near the teeth, while the middle of the tongue lies low in the mouth. In contrast, when the palatalized “l” sound of w†km ‘goal’ is pronounced, the tip of the tongue touches behind the upper teeth, and the blade and the middle of the tongue are raised towards the hard palate. Most consonant articulations in Russian come

1 The discussion here, which is oriented around the level of phonology sometimes termed “broad phonetic,” downplays questions of phonemics: non-linguists find the concept of phoneme unenlightening; variable rules respond to phonetic conditions; problematic cases of phonemic analysis

(in Russian, unstressed vowels; palatalized velars; [È]; [s˛], the sound corresponding to the letter

‹

≤o≥) cannot be resolved without extensive discussion about the actual properties of the sounds, rendering binary decisions about what is or is not phonemic uninformative.

Relationships among related sounds are viewed here as sets. Variants of stressed vowels are grouped together as a set, with the most basic variant standing for the set. For example, [ó] stands for the set including the sound [ó] that occurs between hard consonants and other variants, such as the [o55]⁄that occurs between soft consonants, as in n=nz ‘aunt’. To discuss unstressed vowels in relation to stressed vowels, the concept of a series of vowels is introduced.

2Avanesov’s manual (1972) is informative about variation in phonology, if one corrects for its conservative standard. Panov 1990 is enriched by a valuable historical perspective. Matusevich 1976 and Bondarko 1977 have proven useful. Halle 1959 and Jones and Ward 1969 are good descriptions in English. The research on variation (Panov 1968, Krysin 1974) is summarized and interpreted in Comrie and Stone 1978 and Comrie, Stone, and Polinsky 1996.

28