Hello Philipp,
PR> Hello Rick,
RC>> My native Russian speaker isn't available at the moment, but when she
RC>> pronounced U+0429 for me this morning, it sounded like a single phoneme. And
RC>> when I pronounced an ich-laut for her, she said it was the same sound.
There are two ways to pronounce U+0429. One is a single consonant that
sounds like a softer version of [S] (the sh-sound), the other is very
similar to [StS].
The [StS]-variation, recorded in many foreign textbooks and other
sources, is almost, but not quite, extinct. The single-consonant
version is almost, but not quite, universal in modern Russian.
More clarifications:
- the single-consonant version [S'] is indeed one sound; it's not the
case that it's just [StS] mistakenly believed to be a single sound by
native speakers. [S'] and [StS] are different to a native ear
(but you don't hear [StS] so much anymore).
- both [StS] and [S'] are double in length; that's why in fact [S'] is
usually denotes [S':] in Russian phonetical texts. The letter U+0429
always denotes a double consonant, whether its quality is [S'] or
[StS] (the actual length is not exactly double but somewhat less than
twice the normal consonant length; that is true of all cases of
consonant doubling in Russian, however).
There are very few cases where U+0429 is pronounced as a single [S']
consonant in casual speech; e.g. in the word "voobsche". This is
probably due to such words' high frequency in speech; whether it'll in
time affect the length of U+0429 in general remains to be seen.
- in any case it's a single phoneme, both in the [S'] and the [StS]
version. It contrasts meaningfully with S+tS. S+tS (which occurs
fairly often on morpheme boundaries) sounds slightly different from
U+0429 in its [StS] variant (as far as I can make out; my native
version of U+0429 is [S']).
- the [StS] variation is normally thought of as belonging to the
St.Petersburg [Leningrad] accent. St.Petersburg is where it survives
(barely) today, and it's by no means universal there today. It's
disappeating pretty rapidly. A generation ago, many actors, singers,
sometimes TV announcers used [StS]; today it's no longer considered
acceptable.
- historically, the [StS] pronunciation used to be universal in
Russian (this [StS] evolved from earlier proto-Slavic [St], IIRC; the
same letter denotes [St] in old Slavonic texts). The currently
standard [S'] variation used to be a Moscovite accent feature which
started to appear around 15-16th centuries. Slowly it propagated
throughout most of Russian dialects, until in the end only some
Northern dialects, including the St.Petersburg dialect, remained with
[StS]. This also helps explain why [S'] is always (well, nearly -- see
above) a double consonant, the only such consonant in Russian. It
appeared as a kind of flattening of the differences between S and tS
in [StS], both consonants "coming together", in a way, and forming a
single [S':] (tS is perceived to be a single consonant sound in Russian and is
different from t+S).
- some phonetists prefer to speak of [S'tS] in the St.Petersburg
accent and not [StS]. It's certainly true that the first consonant in
[S'tS] is softer than the standard, rather "hard", Russian [S].
(I am a native speaker.)
-- Anatoly Vorobey, my journal (in Russian): http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/ mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton
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