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

[999999.livejournal.com]

No prob.

----What I wrote below sounds like too much even to the author... If you feel the same, please ignore everything that has to do with meaning and worry about the pronunciation part only-----

This (http://www.svoboda.org/programs/pe/2002/pe.092102.asp) might be useful for pronunciation help now or later:

http://www.svoboda.org/programs/pe/2002/pe.092102.asp

It's a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty story which you can read and listen to. The text is quite difficult, but at least it helps one figure out how things (e.g., palatalized, or soft, sounds) are pronounced. Once you're on that page, you'll have to click on the audio icon above the transcript.

In the first sentence spoken by a man's voice (the first sentence in the first paragraph of the transcript), the soft sounds are the following:

сь in открылась
the last н in накануне
ф in катастрофического
the last н & the glide part of я in наводнения
2nd н in нанесло
т, й (not ж, which is never soft in the standard dialect) in тяжелый
щ (always soft) in ущерб
ч, й in чешской
л (not ц, which is never soft in the standard dialect) in столице

The sentence itself is and means as follows:

Выставка "Франц Кафка и Прага" открылась накануне катастрофического наводнения, которое
exhibition "Franz Kafka and Prague" opened on-the-eve of-catastrophic (of-)flood , which

нанесло тяжелый ущерб чешской столице.
inflicted heavy damage on-Czech (on-)capital.

(The Russian for 'Czech capital' is actually in the dative.)

And, yeah, this is about an exhibition about Kafka and Prague in the Jewish Museum in New York, and the vocabulary is impressive, so I'm not trying to tell you to listen to the whole thing (I sometimes play anywhere from 3 sec to a minute of foreign radio over and over, and that really helps me internatlize the pronunciation). Links to other read-along programs are here (http://www.svoboda.org/realaudio/) - click on a link and you'll get a list of shows, all of which will have a speaker icon next to them while some will also have a clickable show title - those are the read-along ones. Warning: they seem like vocab guzzlers (though this shouldn't matter if you use them to see how things are pronounced).

Good luck!

Re: Part 1

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Wow! Thank you! I'll have a listen and see what I can hear.