Шить

[damiel.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to reconcile the following two "spelling rules"

1. A vowel following the letter ш is always pronounced hard, irrespective of spelling;
2. A ь inserted between a consonant and a soft vowel indicates that the consonant is palatalized and the glide (й) is retained in the pronunciation of the vowel;

to make sense of how the verbal forms of шить (шью, шьёшь, ..., шьют) should be pronounced. To take the first person as an example, does it end up being something like /шу/ or /шы.у/ or /шы.йу/ or /щи.у/ or /щи.йу/ or ...? Also, how many syllables?

Thanks!

Comments

[gera.livejournal.com]

шйу

[giantantattack.livejournal.com]

In these cases ь does not modify the preceding consonant. However, since combinations like шу and шю are both pronounced the same [ʂu] (because ш is retroflex and never palatalized), ь is necessary before "soft" vowels to maintain the palatalization (in the form of the palatal approximant [j]).

Also, шью is one syllable.

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

1 syllable. Consonants and hard/soft signs don't make syllables on their own, they need a vowel. There's just one.

If you were to soften the Russian ш, you'd arrive at Russian щ. Interestingly, the latter is closer to English sh sound than the former. In these words ь acts merely as a delimiter for you not to glue ш with ю to form щу. It's exactly the same kind of thing as in объём (you don't want it to be обём). Don't ask me why different signs (ь vs ъ) are used in these words for the same function - I don't know. :)

[giantantattack.livejournal.com]

If you were to soften the Russian ш, you'd arrive at Russian щ.
Щ is longer than ш. So you would have to lengthen it as well.

Don't ask me why different signs (ь vs ъ) are used in these words for the same function
I was thinking about that too. It is pretty strange. The only reason I could come up with was that, possibly, since ш is always hard, then ъ would seem redundant. But that doesn't make much sense anyway)))

[constpd.livejournal.com]

The Hard Sign (ъ) is written only after the prefix to separate it from roots starting with е,ю,я. Just after the spelling reform and till 1954(?) the prefix was separated with an apostrophe and ъ was never used, but then it was decided to eliminate the apostrophe but to return ъ instead.

[lia910.livejournal.com]

Do you mean to say that in the words like объём or объятие "об-" is a prefix?

[constpd.livejournal.com]

Exactly

[giantantattack.livejournal.com]

I understand this. All I was saying is that it's strange to have шью, шьешь, шьет, etc. written with ь because, phonetically, it is functioning as ъ.

[damiel.livejournal.com]

Consonants and hard/soft signs don't make syllables on their own, they need a vowel.

I asked because I wasn't sure what the vowels (or how many) in the words in the question would be. However, the hard sign does indicate something about syllable boundaries. In a word like объём, the б is the coda to the first syllable, and not the onset to the second: объ.ём and not *о.бъём.