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

[ekeme-ndiba.livejournal.com]

First of all, I'd like to make a correction - "ьи" can be found in Russian words as well. I was thinking of stems only, and forgot junctions of stem and endings. So, there are свиньи pigs/swines, семьи families, скамьи benches and so on.
Now, your question. French "u" [y] is usually transliterated as "ю" - it's pretty far from the original pronunciation, but we haven't anything closer. And additional difficulties occur when this [y] starts a word, so Hubert can be transliterated as Юбер or Убер, both versions seem terrible to me. However, despite the fact that [y] sound doesn't exist in Russian and thus cannot be properly transliterated, it's still not totally alien to the Russian phonetics, so, for example, news readers pronounce it correctly in the French proper names such as Hubert Vedrine. And consonant+"ью" might be used to transliterate French consonant+"iu", but I'm not sure whether such a combination exists in French (sorry, I don't know French at all ;-). As for French [o/] and [oe] (sorry, no IPA) - they're both tranliterated as "ё" (fleur - флёр, Montreaux - Монтрё), and there's the same problem when they start a word. So, eau de cologne is одеколон in Russian. And whenever these sounds are preceeded by "i" or "gn", "ьо" or "ьё" are used (monseigneur - монсеньор, adieu - адьё). Again, I don't know French, so this explanation is quite rough (and maybe inaccurate).
P.S. This article (http://people.ucsc.edu/~padgett/locker/russpal.pdf) may be interesting for you , it concerns Russian and Irish palatalization phenomenon, as well as emerging of [i] sound.

Re: Part 1

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that [ju] is used to transliterate [y]... I guess it works, but simply using [u] is probably closer to the original sound, thust жури is pronounced more like French /jury/ than жюри is.

Re: Part 1

[ekeme-ndiba.livejournal.com]

Really? I think the Russian "ж" is a way harder than the French "j" is (just like Russian "ш" is much harder than the American English "sh" which is closer to "щ" but shorter), so "ю" is more suitable here: Russian normative pronunciation of "жюри" requires slight softening (or palatalization, if you like) of "ж" which is normally always hard in Russian (except "дрожжи", "вожжи" and so on).
P.S. I have an idea to write a comprehensive post about the occasional sounds in Russian that ususally aren't described in reference books, such as voiced [h], voiced [x] or gamma, palatalized [3], [ae] etc.

Re: Part 1

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That would be very helpful.

Re: Part 1

[ataltane.livejournal.com]

That article looks really fascinating. Thanks for the link!