Languages

deardron

What's the matter? You should pronounce them like Russian p,t,k, only escaping any kind of aspiration.

jpdfo1982

Thanks. I sorta had that suspicion about Ď/ď, since I knew that Ť/ť, was a soft T! A question about Serbian and Croatian: Isn't Ć/ć also a soft T? Or is it a version of ts like, but not similar to, Č/č (which is tš) is?

Voiceless b, d and g? Hmm. Well, hehe, all of a sudden I can only thing of voiced examples, but voicelessness usually occurs finally, and -g is always silent, for instance. Our D is never like Icelandic Ð. And we don't have the Spanish B/V sound either. Also, Faroese has two affricates, Č and DŽ (Đ in Croatian, right?), which are written TJ/K(J)/HJ and DJ/G(J).

Anyway, I also like the smaller Indo-European languages, I might have mention them before: Albanian, Armenian and Macedonian for instance. Turkic languages are cool too, for some reason I have my eyes on Türkmen!

And yes, deardron is right.

I learnt, that Russian PTK were un-aspirated in the first place. Or is this dependent on your dialect?

And what difference in dialect should one expect from people from, let's say cities like St. Petersburg, Moscow, Irkutsk and Vladivostok? And is Х not pronunced a bit differently in the border regions of and inside Ukraine?

Hrafn V.

jpdfo1982,
Hm? I would prefer to call you in a less, errr, numerological way...
They are similar, but not equal. Same situation in Polish, which I actually know better: Cz, a sort of Russian "Ч", but pronounced hard ( = tš). This sound descends from common Slave "Ч". And then there is Ć, which is produced at the middle points of toung/palate. This sound comes from *tj, etc.
Considering the stops. You both claim that the Faroese/Icelandic b,d,g are equivalent to non-aspirated p,t,k. Unfortunately S. Einarsson distinguishes in his book B ("voiced"), B 'with a circle' ("devoiced"), P ("conventional") and Ph (aspirated). Already the last two make a problem, because it needs a great effort to acquire aspiration as a phonemic feature. The first two are yet more difficult to tell.
There is not much a variation that a foreigner with a knowledge of common Russian should fail to understand people all over the country. You could notice first of all a presence of some local words or intonations that look weird. Some "irregularities" in declension/conjugation. A different outcome of some medieval processes, e.g. in Moscow you would hear, say [vьr'ofkъ] (верёвка, "rope") and somewhere else maybe [v'ar'ofka], and so on.
The local variations, if they exist (of which I do not know) are not perceived at all.
More important are variants of G: (i) it is a stop in the normative language, except in endings like -ого where it turns into [v]; also a "good speach" accepts to pronounce Бог as [box] or [boh], and Бога with G like in the following cases;
(ii) in the South of Russia you would hear a fricative sound, close to Icelandic G between vowels; (iii) in Ukrainian this sound is rather a voiced (English) H.
Sorry for speaking too much.
.

jpdfo1982

Hrafn V., no please don't stop, this is really interesting.

The thing with soft vs. hard is extremely difficult for me to properly grasp, mostly because I have it easier to learn sounds by mimicking instead of getting instructions on how to place my tongue etc., this might also be because I really don't quite understand the term English uses for the various points of the mouth.

I think, I know now what you refer to. You're referring to final B and P. The final B, or when it's in a non-stressed syllable, is written with a 0 under it in IPA (SAMPA uses _0, so for instance [b_0]). These are the voiceless as you say. Hehe, but alas I don't have the only book I have which explains just a bit about it here with me, so I have to answer you later.

Russian really amazes me with the relative lack of regional variance. But then again, considering what regimes have had control over Russia during the years, it probably isn't that strange after all. And also the fact, that Russia is so vast, would logically try to prevent too much of a linguistical spread, which I assume would be logical to every language. Oh, well I'm speculating again, so I might be off.

Yes, I've noticed that about G. The G -> V was something our teacher wanted us to pay extreme attention to, since we're just beginners and not really into more complex issues yet. Also, she told us about the Ukrainian G -> H.

One other thing, that I'd like to mention about Russian G, is that in some words it seems to have become Ž. Г -> Ж in Cyrillic. For instance, there's Можно, which is могу in 1st person singular.

I'm not familiar with the fricative sound Icelandic G has intervocally. In Faroese intervocal G is a glide or is silent.

But please, Hrafn V., keep writing if you have more.

indiefox

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