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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 ...
The Russian spelling alphabet at right (PDF) The Russian spelling alphabet is a spelling alphabet (or "phonetic alphabet") for Russian, i.e. a set of names given to the alphabet letters for the purpose of unambiguous verbal spelling. It is used primarily by the Russian army, navy and the police.
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 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.
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.
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 .
Because the Russian loanword dacha (дача ) looks like it could be German, the pronunciation / ˈ d ɑː x ə /, with a velar fricative, shows an attempt at marking a word as foreign, but with a sound not originally present in the source word. [14]