Juozas wrote: >
face="Lucida Sans Unicode">This is of course correct but in everyday "city"
language the > contrast is actually lost: vЂ ГЅrЂ Еі
and vЂ ГЅru are exact > homophones. Mr Ambrazas and other
Lithuanian philologists articulate very clearly > and urge everyone to do
this, however, the real life corrects > phonetics in its own way. Yet if
the loss of contrast leads to any > kind of dangerous ambiguity, both
syllables are stressed in > vЂ ГЅrЂ Еі, thus making
it possible to pronounce the last vowel as a long one. >
>From the practical point of view, the long "e" in "Petras" is quite
different from "Ђ С'Ї" in Ђ РїС'ЇС'ўС'¬ because a kind of
"j" sound
>
> (the "y" in "yacht") can be barely heard in the beginning of
the > "Ђ С'Ї".
itself but when a Russian
> This may be hardly spottable in Russian
> says "Petras" he instinctively substitutes
"Ђ С'Ї" for "e" and > "Pyatras" comes out (analogously, a
Lithuanian instinctively > pronounces Ђ РїС'ЇС'ўС'¬ as
[pe:t']). >
Someting has happened to both Lithuanian and
Cyrillic characters, but to the extent the text can be reconstructed I can note
that:
1. All the works on Lithuanian experimental phonetics I have had a
chance to look through state that some kind of phonetical opposition do exist,
whether realized by a native speaker itself or not.
2. As for the [j] onglide in Russian, that's exactly what I
meant and it's undoubtedly present (and the reason here is of course not
historical nor even phonological: it's purely phonetic), but Urban's question
had an important reservation: the NUCLEUS was mentioned. Clear the Russian
sound from glides, consider the positions I mentioned and listen!
:)
Sergei