Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Russian is written with a modern variant of the Cyrillic script.Russian spelling typically avoids arbitrary digraphs.Except for the use of hard and soft signs, which have no phonetic value in isolation but can follow a consonant letter, no phoneme is ever represented with more than one letter.
This spelling rule does not have a great deal of effect on actual Russian pronunciation, because when unstressed, the vowels о and е are weakened to a very weak sound like the schwa. Note that this rule relates to the fact that stressed о after ж, ц, ч, ш and щ is pronounced the same as the always-stressed letter ё after the same ...
This combination of the letter "а" and the soft sign "ь" denotes a specific vowel sound. Similarly, the digraph оь is used for /œ/ or /ø/, and уь for /y/. Additional iotated forms like юь and яь are used as needed. This usage of the soft sign is similar to the trailing "e" in German when umlauts are unavailable.
In the pronunciation of the Russian language, several ways of vowel reduction (and its absence) are distinguished between the standard language and dialects. Russian orthography most often does not reflect vowel reduction, which can confuse foreign-language learners, but some spelling reforms have changed some words.
Russian distinguishes hard (unpalatalized or plain) and soft (palatalized) consonants (both phonetically and orthographically). Soft consonants, most of which are denoted by a superscript ʲ , are pronounced with the body of the tongue raised toward the hard palate , like the articulation of the y sound in yes .
Russian also preserves palatalized consonants that are followed by another consonant more often than other Slavic languages do. Like Polish, it has both hard postalveolars (/ʂ ʐ/) and soft ones (/tɕ ɕː/ and marginally or dialectically /ʑː/). Russian has vowel reduction in unstressed syllables.
Because Russian borrows terms from other languages, there are various conventions for sounds not present in Russian. For example, while Russian has no , there are a number of common words (particularly proper nouns) borrowed from languages like English and German that contain such a sound in the
This is because the pronunciation of the two letters is significantly different, and Russian ы normally continues Common Slavic *y [ɨ], which was a separate phoneme. The letter щ is conventionally written št in Bulgarian, šč in Russian. This article writes šš' in Russian to reflect the modern pronunciation [ɕɕ].