Juozas wrote:

> I believe there are many people in
> Russia who keep their d's and t's clean and don't elongate a's
> (ka'zyol --> ka:zyol (he-goat) but under the influence of Muscovite
> accent where all these peculiarities seem to come from, the number of
> those purist will be diminishing.


> As to Russians in Lithuania, their Russian is lituanizing quite
> rapidly. The Russian language they're speaking is already spoiled and
> they end up speaking Lithuanian with slight Russian accent and vice
> versa. I think this is happening to all linguistic minorities in any
> country (Piotr, do you agree that the so-called Poles, living in
> southeastern Lithuania, can't speak any language at all except for
> their fancy Polish-Lithuanian-Russian-Byelorussian lingo?).

I would rather not comment undisguised political incorrectness (or even some
kind of -phobia) that can be found in this posting. What I would like to
comment is a presumtuous incompetence that shows through every line, which
seemes to be especially strange taking into acoount the fact that the author
comments a foreign language.

'Clean' and 'unclean' dental stops is a brand new approach to Russian
phonology, the only demerit being complete senseless of the term. If
'depalatalized' is what is meant, that's a strong requirement of STANDARD
Russian to palatalize them to such an extent. To what extent - that's the
peculiarity of Russian. Depalatalized dental stops are treated as a strong
accent (for instance, Ukrainian), only slightly palatalized as light accent
(for instance, Lithuanian). Such palatalizing is of course based on
peculiarities of those dialects that the standard Russian was formed from,
but it of course is not pertinent to those dialects only. Eventually this is
the Viatichy-Severiane-(partly)Krivichy dialectal continuity, which shows
strong relationship to Lechitian dialects (cf. palatalization up to
affricates in Polish and Belorussian). As for prolongated [a] in some
positions, this indeed is a feature of Muscovite pronunciation (as well as
of a number of dialects, some of them being spoken geographically far from
Moscow, as those of Don area), but this pronunciation is treated as 'folsky'
and not used by educated Muscovites themselves. The example given (a rude
term of abuse) shows that the author probably has something personal about
the issue :)

As for 'already spoiled' Russian, 'so called Poles' etc, the terms and
'scientific paradigm' used comment themselves and aren't worth arguing.
Still hope Juozas used some other data than those of the sort you can
acqiure discussing something in a bar or in a train compartement talking to
a delightful chance companion. If so, I would really appreciate any
statistical data (for instance, what percent of by experts opinion.. etc).

Sergei