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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 .
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.
It commonly represents the voiced retroflex sibilant /ʐ/ or voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, like the pronunciation of the s in "measure". It is also often used with D to approximate the sound in English of the Latin letter J with a ДЖ combination. Zhe is romanized as zh , j or ž .
If the pronunciation in a specific accent is desired, square brackets may be used, perhaps with a link to IPA chart for English dialects, which describes several national standards, or with a comment that the pronunciation is General American, Received Pronunciation, Australian English, etc. Local pronunciations are of particular interest in ...
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.
It affects the pronunciation of the preceding consonant by giving it a palatal quality or causing it to become a palatal consonant. The soft sign acts as a visual marker to show that the consonant before it is palatalized. For example, in Russian, the soft sign is often used after consonants to indicate palatalization.
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].
If I can use an analogy with other languages, Russian /ʒ/ and /ʃ/ are (usually) harder than English, unpalatalised. Russian "ш" sounds more like German "sch" or Chinese "sh", rather than English "sh". However, Russian /tʃ/ is always palatalised (soft), it doesn't sound like a merged "тш" /tʃ/ to Russians but rather a /tɕ/.