Re: Odp: Proto-Slavic "bear"

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 935
Date: 2000-01-15

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Alexander Stolbov
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2000 9:53 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Proto-Slavic "bear"

[Gene]:
> One more thing on my use of 'U' for the Russian 'back i' sound. I
> really don't like to use 'y' to transcribe it because it creates a lot
> of confusion - the same letter is also used to transcribe the 'short
> i', and I've come across quite a few Slavic last names with both sounds
> present in them. Slavic 'back i' is a very peculiar sound not found in
> most other IE branches (I think Portuguese has it, but I can't remember
> any more). When people who don't speak Russian see this letter in a
> Russian word, they first think of a sound like in English "yes", then
> of a French 'u' sound...
>
> Anyway, I think it's all quite ambiguous and I wish there was a
> different way of transcribing it.
>
> Gene
>
> PS: For those unfamiliar with the sound in question, try to pronounce a
> long 'u' as in "foot" but with your lips stretched as if you were
> saying the long 'i' as in "feet".
>

Hi Gene,
You are quite right - using "y" letter for the transliteration of Russian words
is ambiguous.
Let's take Russian masc. ajective which means 'quick' :  "bystryy" where 1st and
2nd "y" stand for 'back i' and 3rd "y" for 'short i'.

About 'back i' in non-Slavic IE languages (BTW in Turkic languages this is one
of the most popular vowels). My ear hears this sound in some German words like
"sind", "Tisch" or "Ziffer" (at least as these words are pronounced in Russia
;-).
Besides, the 'back i' letter is widely used to write in Russian the names of
Romanian towns like Tirgu-Mures, Tirgoviste, Iasi and other (unfortunately I
don't know how they sound).

A question to English native-speakers: don't you pronounce actually a variant of
'back i' when saying words containing the SHI combination (shiver, shin, shit
etc.)? (Of course, if your SH is really a hard [sh], not a soft [shch]).

Alexander
I'm not a native speaker but I teach English phonetics. English SH is always "soft" (that is, palato-alveolar) like Russian SHCH, and the degree to which syllable-INITIAL consonants influence the quality of vowels is negligible in English. Russian SH is postalveolar and remarkably "dark", and it does have a retracting effect on any vowel that follows
 
The vowel we're discussing is, technically, an "unrounded high central" vowel (the IPA symbol is [ɨ], i with a crossbar in case your browser can't read it). Both Polish and Russian have vowels that could be so transcribed. The Russian variety is very high and strongly retracted (thus, incidentally, also in Belarusian), while the Polish sound is opener and slightly fronted, though not quite as front as typical realisations of English /i/ in bit. The closest things in English are probably the following:
  • the broad Australian pronunciation of the vowel in bird or nurse (higher than in Received Pronunciation),
  • the Scottish vowel in bit (not unlike Polish y),
  • (in most accents) lax /i/ modified by a following dark /l/, as in bill or children.
You're absolutely right about its being a common vowel in Turkic (and generally in "Altaic"); Romanian î is the same kind of vowel; so is (northern) Welsh y in such words as dydd 'day' or plentyn 'child'. It occurs in many native languages of Africa and Northern America, and is typically found (beside /a/ and schwa) in those very simple vowel systems which are characteristic of the languages of the Caucasus. Not an uncommon sound, cross-linguistically.
 
Piotr