In Vytautas Ambrazas' Lithuanian Grammar
it says "[U]nstressed [long] vowels in Standard Lithuanian show a tendency to be
shortened and turn into half-long (sometimes even relatively short) tense
vowels. These changes do not harm the phonological system: the contrast is not
lost, but only modified. The occasional complete neutralization of the quantity
of unstressed vowels can be explained only as a phenomenon of some other (mainly
dialectal or sociolectal) phonological system." Some of the examples he
gives are acc. sg. duoną
vs. nom sg. duona, where the final vowels differ in
quantity, and výrų vs.
výru, where they differ in both quantity and -- apparently --
quality. What I haven't been able to understand is if the same applies to root
vowels, like, e.g., the <e> in kẽlias
vs. keliù, or <a> in stãlas vs.
stalù (I wonder what happened to the tildes). What say ye,
native speakers?
One thing I noticed during the short
time I actually had a Lithuanian teacher was that her version of [æː]/<e>
in Petras was virtually identical to (my) Swedish allophone of
<æ(ː)>
before /r/, and from what I've gathered subsequently it probably wasn't a just
peculiar idiolectal feature of hers. Now that we have people who know both
Lithuanian and Russian on the list it seems like a good opportunity to ask about
the realization of <я>
between two 'soft' consonants in standard Russian and other varieties in words
like пять.
How close to standard Lithuanian [æː]
would you say that this vowel is (as regards the quality of the syllabic
nucleus)? And in what way(s) does it
differ?
Urban