> Oops. I thought you could copy and paste IPA characters within the
> same post but it apparently didn't work. In case Urban wants a
> readable reply, I'm latinizing the Lithuanian and Cyrillic
> characters :)
>
> >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.
>
> This is of course correct but in everyday "city" language the
> contrast is actually lost: vyroo and vyru 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
> vyroo, thus making it possible to pronounce the last vowel as
> a long one.
>
> >How close to standard Lithuanian [ae] would you say that this vowel
> >is (as regards the quality of the syllabic nucleus)? And in what way
> >(s) does it differ?
>
> >From the practical point of view, the long "e" in "Petras" is quite
> different from "ja" in [pjat'] because a kind of "j" sound
> (the "y" in "yacht") can be barely heard in the beginning of the
> "ja".
> This may be hardly spottable in Russian itself but when a Russian
> says "Petras" he instinctively substitutes "ja" for "e" and
> "Pyatras" comes out (analogously, a Lithuanian instinctively
> pronounces [pjat'] as [pe:t']).
>
> Juozas Rimas
>
>
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