Hello Philipp, PR> Hello Rick,
RC>> My native Russian speaker isn't available at the moment, but when she RC>> pronounced U+0429 for me this morning, it sounded like a single phoneme. And RC>> when I pronounced an ich-laut for her, she said it was the same sound. There are two ways to pronounce U+0429. One is a single consonant that sounds like a softer version of [S] (the sh-sound), the other is very similar to [StS]. The [StS]-variation, recorded in many foreign textbooks and other sources, is almost, but not quite, extinct. The single-consonant version is almost, but not quite, universal in modern Russian. More clarifications: - the single-consonant version [S'] is indeed one sound; it's not the case that it's just [StS] mistakenly believed to be a single sound by native speakers. [S'] and [StS] are different to a native ear (but you don't hear [StS] so much anymore). - both [StS] and [S'] are double in length; that's why in fact [S'] is usually denotes [S':] in Russian phonetical texts. The letter U+0429 always denotes a double consonant, whether its quality is [S'] or [StS] (the actual length is not exactly double but somewhat less than twice the normal consonant length; that is true of all cases of consonant doubling in Russian, however). There are very few cases where U+0429 is pronounced as a single [S'] consonant in casual speech; e.g. in the word "voobsche". This is probably due to such words' high frequency in speech; whether it'll in time affect the length of U+0429 in general remains to be seen. - in any case it's a single phoneme, both in the [S'] and the [StS] version. It contrasts meaningfully with S+tS. S+tS (which occurs fairly often on morpheme boundaries) sounds slightly different from U+0429 in its [StS] variant (as far as I can make out; my native version of U+0429 is [S']). - the [StS] variation is normally thought of as belonging to the St.Petersburg [Leningrad] accent. St.Petersburg is where it survives (barely) today, and it's by no means universal there today. It's disappeating pretty rapidly. A generation ago, many actors, singers, sometimes TV announcers used [StS]; today it's no longer considered acceptable. - historically, the [StS] pronunciation used to be universal in Russian (this [StS] evolved from earlier proto-Slavic [St], IIRC; the same letter denotes [St] in old Slavonic texts). The currently standard [S'] variation used to be a Moscovite accent feature which started to appear around 15-16th centuries. Slowly it propagated throughout most of Russian dialects, until in the end only some Northern dialects, including the St.Petersburg dialect, remained with [StS]. This also helps explain why [S'] is always (well, nearly -- see above) a double consonant, the only such consonant in Russian. It appeared as a kind of flattening of the differences between S and tS in [StS], both consonants "coming together", in a way, and forming a single [S':] (tS is perceived to be a single consonant sound in Russian and is different from t+S). - some phonetists prefer to speak of [S'tS] in the St.Petersburg accent and not [StS]. It's certainly true that the first consonant in [S'tS] is softer than the standard, rather "hard", Russian [S]. (I am a native speaker.) -- Anatoly Vorobey, my journal (in Russian): http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton
