Word stress in Russian

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

Hey, everyone. I was wondering if there are any simple (or not so simple) tricks to telling where the stress on a Russian word is. I only recently learned the whole "if an adjective ends in ой, the ой is stressed" rule, and I read a lot more Russian than I hear, so I figure I'll probably learn better pronunciation if I know where the stresses go.

Спасибо.

Comments

[ars-longa.livejournal.com]

AFAIR, none. It's totally random with very few exceptions - like with words borrowed from French. Even native speakers sometimes don't know where the stress is in some words.

[oatmealia.livejournal.com]

Does this by any chance make it sound less strange to a Russian if one is to mistake stress in less common words?

Less strange than it would sound to someone speaking English, that is, where stress is almost always agreed on.

[ars-longa.livejournal.com]

No, I think pretty much everybody agrees on really common words. An unappropriately put stressing in them might be taken as a sign of undereducation. But I don't think it applies to foreiners - no one expects you guys to learn all this insanity we call our language perfectly. :)

By the way, I have the same problem with English...

[oatmealia.livejournal.com]

Oh, but on uncommon words? Is this equally or more accepted than in English?

I can imagine that there is a stress difficulty with English. :) I used it as an example because it does not seem to be as debatable as it does in Russian.

Thank you for your response. :)

[viteksafronov.livejournal.com]

I remember the only rule about letter 'ё'. This letter is always stressed.

[philena.livejournal.com]

Yes. But it's not always written with the dots, which means that any time you see an e you have to guess 1) is it stressed, and then 2) if it is stressed is it pronounced as e or as o?

[viteksafronov.livejournal.com]

Yup. And this is a problem of people typing "е" instead of "ё". I hate them :)
But anyway you can determine correct word spelling using a dictionary and unfortunately there is nothing else you can do.

[stephan-nn.livejournal.com]

I always put dots... Unfortunately many people think that it is not separate letter but umlaut((((
But it's a letter

[robomarkov.livejournal.com]

perhaps a good way to romanize "ё" is to type "e:", but it may be confusing for punctuation purposes.

[stephan-nn.livejournal.com]

Not always))

For example "трёхэтажный" stressed at "A"..

[yozhevich.livejournal.com]

Isn't there still at least a secondary stress on the 'ё'? Compound words are tricky...

[yozhevich.livejournal.com]

Sorry, this is answered below. I'll read all the way next time :)

[stephan-nn.livejournal.com]

I think, "ё" is half-stressed.

[noser.livejournal.com]

Well, the ой is stressed because it became an ой due to the stress. So, you can say that if an adjective ends with ый or ий, they are not stressed.

I think this is correct. Can't think of a disproving example right away...

[brocster.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, as some of the previous posters have stated, stress in Russian is, for all intents and purposes, unpredictable. Not only can you not determine ahead of time which syllable (in, say, the Nominative singular) will be stressed, you will also need to deal with the fact that a decent percentage of Russian words have shifting stress within a single grammatical paradigm -- in other words, the syllable that is stressed in the Nominative singular might not be stressed in the Accusative singular... or the Nominative plural... or both (a little bit like in English photograph but photography). For example:

рука (Nom. sg.)
руку (Acc. sg.)
руки (Nom/Acc. pl.)
рукам (Dat. pl.)

Fortunately, there are a bunch of words that follow this same pattern, so you have:

нога (Nom. sg.) --> ногу (Acc. pl.)
ноги (Nom/Acc. pl.) --> ногам (Dat. pl.)

just like рука. And голова works the same way (stress on the last syllable in the Nom. sg., Gen. pl., Dat. pl.; stress on the first syllable in the Acc. sg. and Nom/Acc. pl.; etc.).

But then you have a word like губа, which appears to follow the same pattern:

губа (Nom. sg.)
губы (Nom/Acc. pl.)
губам (Dat. pl.)

BUT the Acc. sg. (which we expect to be *губу) is actually губу!

So you just have to memorize the stress patterns for each word. Fortunately, the stress doesn't shift in all words, so it's certainly not an impossible task... but it does require some mental gymnastics, at least initially.

Verbs can also have shifting stress -- sometimes only in the present, sometimes only in the past, sometimes both. And adjectives as well, but only in the short form (usually the feminine short form... and sometimes the plural short form as well).

Honestly, there are virtually no clues (or cues) to figuring out where the stress is in Russian words. As viteksafronov wrote, the letter ё is always stressed. The only problem is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, Russian does not write the two dots over the ё, which means that the resulting letter is "e" and thus cannot be differentiated from regular "e". Many words can even have a "hidden" ё that will only show up when the stress shifts to that syllable, such as:

сестра (Nom. sg.) --> сёстры (Nom. pl.) and there's also сестёр (Gen/Acc. pl.), or

дешёвый (masc. Nom. sg. adjective) --> дёшево (adverb)

Even in these cases, though, you will most likely NOT see the two dots over the ё, even when stressed, unless there might possibly be some confusion or misunderstanding (such as, say, "Все это поймут", which could еither be "все" (everyone) or "всё" (everything, all)) -- then they'll usually write in the two dots.

As for the "if an adjective ends in -ой, the -ой is stressed" rule, that only works if you know the masculine Nominative singular form. After all, the form новой exists, but it's not end-stressed. It's just the feminine singular form for the Genitive, Dative, Instrumental and Prepositional cases.

There's one more "semi-useful" rule, in this case, with verbs. If a verb is prefixеd with вы-, then the stress will fall on the вы- AS LONG AS you're dealing with the perfective aspect of the verb. If the imperfective aspect also has the вы- prefix, then it won't be stressed. For example:

жить --> живу BUT выжить --> выживу.

(**Note, though, that the imperfective form of выжить is выживать. So you have to know if you're dealing with a perfective or imperfective form for this rule to be helpful.)


Any decent dictionary will indicate any stress shifts, "hidden" ё's and other conjugation/declension oddities, so be sure to look for that when choosing a dictionary.

Best of luck with your Russian studies!!

- Andrew : )

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder how we manage to speak our own language without really thinking about the patterns we follow. Our hard disk must have more megabytes than some other peoples' :)

Seriously, I really appreciate this academically precise and ideas-dense contribution, however scary for the beginner learners it may seem :)

[brocster.livejournal.com]

I thought the same thing when I started studying Russian. And then I took Czech! It's hard to say exactly, but my best estimate is that Czech is about 4-5 times more difficult than Russian. So maybe the Czechs have gigabyte-sized brains.... : )




I'm glad to be of assistance (hopefully!). I certainly don't want (and didn't mean) to scare anyone. But, as with English, stress in Russian is simply unpredictable. After a while, though, it becomes much less of a problem. : )


- Andrew : )

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

Then again, your language actually has regular verbs. ;)

And nouns:

[stpetersburg.livejournal.com]

Singular goose, plural geese.
Singular moose, plural moose

[stephan-nn.livejournal.com]

But "трёх-" as prefix is not stressed.

[brocster.livejournal.com]

Actually, it is. You pronounce it as "tryokh-etazhnyj" (sorry for the transcription -- in Cyrillic I guess you could write something like трьоx-этажный) -- in other words, there are actually TWO stressed syllables in this word. If the ё weren't stressed here, then the pronunciation would sound somewhat like "трxэтажный" with only ONE stressed syllable.

Compare the pronunciation of the following two words:

трёxэтажный (two stressed syllables)
треугольник (one stressed syllable)


- Andrew : )

[stephan-nn.livejournal.com]

I think it's half-stressed leter.

For example in Волгоград. I never say [валгаграт], but [волгаграт]
Because of the same reason
:)

[videtur.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaaaaaahhhh I feel like giving up!

[scarlet1983.livejournal.com]

Hm. I hate reading these things. As long as I don't think about stress patterns, I don't really have a problem with them. Luckily my memory is pretty good, so I only have to hear a word once or twice to remember how to pronounce it. But it's really awful if you actually think about it. =/

[krikketgirl.livejournal.com]

Thank you for asking this! I have the same struggle, as I am learning primarily from reading.