The Phonemes of Russian

Abstract

1. In LANGUAGE 10. 43ff. (1934), R. G. Kent, in his review of L. Bloomfield's Language (New York, 1933), mentions Bloomfield's transcription of the Russian word for city, gorod. Bloomfield writes ['gorot], while Kent would prefer ['gorat]. The justification given to Kent by Bloomfield for his transcription is: 'Weakening of unstressed syllables in Russian is sufficiently indicated when the place of accent is given, i.e., ['gorot] but plural [goro'da] tells as much as ['gorat, gara'da]: in fact, to the persons who know the rule which you cite, it tells more, since each of these transcriptions indicates both the accented and the unstressed forms of each vowel-phoneme, whereas ['gorat], for instance, fails to tell whether the second syllable has [o] or [a] or [i].' The words after 'whereas' have brought to my attention the question of a satisfactory representation of the unstressed Russian vowels from the point of view of a true phonemic transcription. In this paper I propose to discuss the matter, and certain points of consonant structure. 2. It will be necessary to present Russian words in orthographical form (in transliteration), and in phonetic and phonemic transcriptions. The words cited are in roman type, the transliteration without other distinguishing marks, the transcriptions in brackets; translations are in italics. For the transliteration these points are to be noted: 3 and f have their usual phonetic value; c is used for the letter equivalent to English ch in chat; fc is a single letter; ts is a single letter; t + s is represented by t.s; i is the so-called 'short-i' used as the second element of diphthongs; x is the velar voiceless spirant; j represents the so-called 'soft-sign' (palatalizer), and also occurs in ja, ju; y is a historical transcription for the letter 'jery', the sound being now a part of the i-phoneme; e is non-iotacized e. For the phonetic transcription we use a small subjoined j after consonant symbols to indicate the palatalized sounds ([ps, b,, tj, d,] etc.); [c] for the affricate (usually written [tf]); [i, u] are tense vowels; [I, u) are lax; [i] is the unrounded mid-vowel (orthographi334