Palatilaziation - Ь and Ъ

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Can someone help me with ь (soft sign) and ъ (hard sign) [or do I have them reversed?]. My first question is, how do you know when a letter is going to be hard or soft? It seems like in English we only use the soft sounds, because borrowed words almost always take a soft sound. In other words, the Russian tendency is to make hard sound and the English tendency is to make a soft sound (thus film → фильм* ; New → Нью). I'm sure this is completely off base, it's just a trend that I've noticed.

I once read—perhaps on in this community—that the sound is very different to Russian ears, but the subtle difference sounds the same to English ears. It was compared to the final sound in the words bed and bet vs the words угил and угиль. Russians cannot distinguish between "bed" and "bet" but I find that very hard to believe... Would a Russian pronounce бэд and бэт the same way?

Anyway, if someone could explain this process of palatilazation to me I would be very greatful.

*Film may have come from French, but the same principle applies.

Comments

Re: Part 1

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

So, here's the most frequent mistake of native English speakers: they say привъет instead of привет (i.e. they don't palatalize "v" but yotize "e" while it's supposed to be done vice versa).

Are you saying that there's no [j] sound before the [e] in привет? I'm not expert so I'm a little hesitant to do this, but I have to disagree with you. I've heard a native speaker pronounce it as [privjet] and in this entry (http://www.livejournal.com/community/learn_russian/18671.html) people confirmed that привет is indeed pronounced privjet.

Re: Part 1

[ekeme-ndiba.livejournal.com]

No way, I'm a native speaker myself. Palatalization may be confused with yotization, if the speech is expressly overemphasized (and I think that's the case). But just keep in mind that in fact you have to add [j] only if a compund vowel (я, е, ё, ю) 1) starts a word or follows 2) another vowel or 3) hard/soft sign. In any other case these vowels only affect the quality of a preceeding consonant, staying unyotized themselves. The most confusing thing is that j/y's are often used in transliteration to represent palatalization.

Re: Part 1

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Interesting, you should inform the other native speakers here (http://www.livejournal.com/community/learn_russian/18671.html) of this, because they seem to disagree with you.

Re: Part 1

[ekeme-ndiba.livejournal.com]

It's a shortcoming of transliteration/transcription, so karakal's and oblomov's comments are somewhat incorrect and may have lead you to misunderstanding. Please read again irkin's comment on the same page, she's absolutely right when she emphasizes the absence of [й] after consonants (and that's a quite common rule, there are even no dialects that add [й] in such cases).

Re: Part 1

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

Re: Part 1

[ekeme-ndiba.livejournal.com]

And the second supposition. In Russian, е/э aren't that close [e], they represent another, open sound (unfortunately, I have no IPA - but it's epsilon, Unicode 0x025B). So, you might mix it up with [je].