On Fri, Aug 09, 2002 at 03:47:40PM +0200, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> Hello Radovan,
>
> RG> that is indeed the "official" pronunciation,
>
> No, it really isn't!
>
not even if you ask your fellow innocent russian speakers
"please read for me this word v e r y s l o w l y"
and listen carefully?
> RG> and if you ask an (educated) Russian
> RG> speaker to slowly pronounce a word with [U+0429] he will pronounce it as
> RG> [StS]
>
> No, he really won't!
it is some time since I had an access to Russian speakers :-)
so unfortunately I cannot try it
We were certainly taught to pronounce щ as шч (soft ч before soft
vowels, of course), but all my russian teachers were Slovaks...
>
> RG> but I guess it is influenced by orthography.
>
> What's the orthography got to do with it??
if the children in schools are taught that "щ" is pronounced
as "шч", they (those who are paying atention) will remember it
and then use this pronunciation when asked to pronounce each phoneme
of a given word.
An interesting example:
In an older Slovak orthography, certain voiced consonants at the
beginning of words were written as unvoiced ("sber" vs. current "zber").
You can still hear this (over-correct) pronunciation (/sber/) when
listening to older educated people (i.e. those who did a lot of reading in
the old orthography). In the old times, you could use this as an indication
of a speaker's degree of education.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk | ----------------------------------------------------------- Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
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