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 2

[ataltane.livejournal.com]

семя isn't made-up, it means "seed".

Purely fortuitous, I assure you. :)

Nice to hear (if I understand you correctly) that the textbooks are wrong on yet another thing that didn't match my experience (like the myth about the pronounciation of 'щ') :)

As for before a word that starts with a voiced consonant, I can hear that ok.

Off topic warning: linguistic ramblings ahead

Interesting. This reminds me of nothing more than Irish: Compare

her coat: 'a cóta' ('а кота', ignoring some inaccuracy with the vowels)

his coat: 'a chóta' ('а хота')

their coat: 'a gcota' ('а гота').

The reason for this is in the indoeuropean sources for the words:

a meaning 'his' < eyso
a meaning 'her' < eysos
a meaning 'their' < eysom

In Irish, consonants between vowels were lenited (weakened: typically stops became fricatives), and consonants between a nasal and a vowel were make voiced (or became nasals themselves).

In Irish though, the final s and m of the disappeared after affecting the following consonant, and the merely phonetic accommodation became grammaticised. OK, completely off topic I know, but it's a similar kind of thing to what happens in Russian (except it's still merely phonetic there)

Another Irish/Russian connection: Irish has series of hard and soft consonants too, though we use a writing system more akin to the Polish method to mark it. Personally, I think Irish should be written in Cyrillic (http://ataltane.net/conlangs/sampla-ga.pdf) :).

(Cross posted to mothertonguemothertongue)

Re: Part 2

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Ай лайк райтинг Энглиш ин Сариллик. :D

Re: Part 2

[ataltane.livejournal.com]

хе хе... фор мор зайнинесс, лоок хер:


http://www.livejournal.com/community/ru_ireland/18781.html?thread=82781#t82781

Re: Part 2

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks for the link.