----- Original Message -----From: Sergejus TarasovasSent: Monday, April 17, 2000 8:52 PMSubject: RE: [phoNet] SV: RussianIPA is not meant to be absolutely accurate; it's a practical, not a formal system. The vowel space is continuous and multidimensional. Even its physical interpretation either in articulatory (tongue position, lip rounding etc.) or in acoustics terms (F1, F2, etc.) is far from straightforward; some phoneticians, especially the acoustically-minded ones, prefer a vowel triangle (with [i], [a], [u] at the vertices) to a vowel quadrangle based on (rather outdated) ideas about the role of the tongue surface in the articulation of vowels.
Russian vowels, even unstressed ones, undergo coarticulation rules not found in English; they develop onglides and offglides adjusted to the pronunciation of the adjacent consonants. To find anything comparable in English one would have to go to the American South. (The phonetics of Irish Gaelic is even more akin to that of Russian.)
As for schwa, it isn't a stable vowel in English, because it has no definite articulatory target; it easily adjusts to whatever environment it occurs in. When prepausal, as in sofa, it's usually mid-open (IPA [ɐ]) and lengthened. Before a velar consonant, as in recognise, it's mid-high or (in some accents) just high and sometimes retracted (IPA [ɘ], [ɨ], [ɯ̈]); in other environments it may have the quality of a mid-central vowel [ɜ]. The symbol [ə] is deliberately ambiguous; it stands for any phonetically reduced vowel which isn't distinctively low, front or rounded.
As for the quality of [ɪ], there are also significant differences between various accents of English (e.g. Australian [ɪ] is higher than in RP, and Scots [ɪ] is more centralised. The same is true of other IPA letters. The conventional symbol [ʌ] is used for rather different vowels in RP, General American, Scots, Irish English, Russian (the second weak vowel of молоко [məɫʌ'kɔ] 'milk') etc. In a very narrow transcription you can always use diacritics to pin down a particular quality or to express other niceties like the prelabialisation of the stressed /ɔ/: [...'ku̯ɔ]. How much accuracy is desirable depends on what you wish to describe.
What counts when we use [ɪ] and [ə] for the purpose of transcribing Russian is that we indicate a contrast between two different weak vowels, one of them front (and relatively high) and the other non-front. Since an immediately pretonic /i/ retains its identity as a phoneme, there is no reason why it shouldn't be rendered simply as [i] except in VERY narrow phonetic transcription, where a special IPA diacritic may be used to represent its slightly mid-centralised allophone [i ̽].
Piotr
Sergei wrote:
1. [ъ] = [ǝ], [ь] = [ɪ] . Well, that's what I could expect asking the question, but the point is that I would strongly deny the fact [ъ] and [ь] are equal at least to English [ǝ] and [ɪ] (especially [ɪ] in заяц, лягушка etc seemes to be very far from it's English, especially Am. E. counterpart). May be the IPA just didn't want to go too far in trying to reach accuracy? :)
2. How about unstressed <и> in syllables immediately before the stress?
Sergei