2014-09-29 5:34 GMT+04:00 Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>:On Sunday, September 28, 2014 02:41:39 Alexander Kozhevnikov wrote:
> More and more these discussions reveal to me that my understanding of what
> a "stress" on a syllable means is flawed/limited - it was based on what my
> parents/school taught me with regard to Russian (in America on the other
> hand I've virtually never had syllable stress/emphasis come up in
> discussion of how to pronounce things: closest thing that comes to mind
> is a quote from some sitcom where one character says "you're putting
> the emphAsis on the wrong syllAble", and to clarify, besides
> stress/emphasis, they also made those 'A's like lojban's 'a' sound, not
> like their typical pronunciation, which in my mind is more like a lojban
> 'y' typically.)
Those stressed A's should actually be pronounced as /æ/.
> So to give some context: My understanding, and I very very tentatively
> want to say most Russians' understanding, is that there is no real
> distinction between emphasis and stress on a syllable (I think this is
> still correct?), but also that there is and can ever be only one syllable
> per word that is stressed (this latter part I was taught early enough that
> somehow, despite it not being logically sound now that I think about it,
> I can't for the life of me recall rejecting it ever since). Because of
> this, I have ONLY my Russian childhood based understanding of syllable
> stress to guide me.
There are a few words with two stresses in Russian, like "четырёхсотый". There
are also some Spanish words with two stresses, such as "acuáticamente" (the
first e in "-mente" is also stressed). In English, sufficiently long words have
some syllables with secondary stress.
> Okay, so worse still, as you bring up, in Russian the 'a' and 'o' vowels
> are collapsed (is that a/the technical term for this?) into what sounds
> like the lojban 'y' when not stressed. So my understanding of what it even
> means to stress a syllable was at least partly conflated with actually
> changing the phoneme until recently as well.
It's actually called "vowel reduction". English does this, but the rules are
different than in Russian: 'o' can sound like /a/ in stressed syllables.
Spanish does not (though there's a dialect in which vowels are changed in the
presence of a swallowed 's'), nor does Finnish.
> Yes, I think some or even most of us don't actually realize either of
> these phoneme transformations happen. We also effectively claim "жи" is
> really pronounced "жы", ditto for "ши"->"шы" (sidenote, this is so
> ingrained I had to retrain myself for the lojban "ji" and "ci"
> combinations to pronounce them with an actual "i" sound), but those are
> really heavily asserted in early teaching, so I ended up picking it up
> consciously. I only noticed the в->ф thing when I was already in America
> and working to maintain/further my Russian: I kept writing things ending
> with ф because that's what they sounded like, then getting corrected that
> it's actually в. I wonder if Russians who spent more time immersed in just
> Russian end up not noting the latter, or perhaps even not noticing the
> former. But to answer your question, I know a phonetically-faithful
> reproduction is "kojevnikyv", but see Gleki's reply to your statement and
> my additional reply after it:
There are Turkic languages, like Kazakh, that have both "жи" and "жы" and
pronounce them differently.жи is exactly how i pronounce {ji} in Lojban.жы (unstressed) is exactly how i pronounce {jy} in Lojban.
Pierre
--
li ze te'a ci vu'u ci bi'e te'a mu du
li ci su'i ze te'a mu bi'e vu'u ci
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