Russian phonology question

[Peter T. Daniels]

I have a new doctor -- Vladimir Znamensky -- and I assumed the
m is soft, i.e. Znam'ensky -- but I asked, and he pronounced it
completely unmarked. So I asked him to write it in Cyrillic --
Знаменский.

No є, no hard sign. (Which seems to occur, post-1917,
only after a prefix.)

Is everything I've read about Russian vowel letters wrong? Or
is he from a minority dialect? He has a slight accent, as if he
immigrated around age 12 or so, maybe 30 years ago, when
that presumably ceased being a problem.

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2022-06-15, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> I have a new doctor -- Vladimir Znamensky -- and I assumed the
> m is soft, i.e. Znam'ensky -- but I asked, and he pronounced it
> completely unmarked. So I asked him to write it in Cyrillic --
> Знаменский.

As you probably know, that should be [ˈznamʲɛnʲsʲkʲɪj].

Personally, I have little faith in my ability to recognize palatalized
consonants as such.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Wednesday, June 15, 2022 at 4:30:06 PM UTC-4, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2022-06-15, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> > I have a new doctor -- Vladimir Znamensky -- and I assumed the
> > m is soft, i.e. Znam'ensky -- but I asked, and he pronounced it
> > completely unmarked. So I asked him to write it in Cyrillic --
> > Знаменский.
>
> As you probably know, that should be [ˈznamʲɛnʲsʲkʲɪj].

And he insisted it isn't. Hence the wondering about dialect.
Or maybe heritage language loss?

> Personally, I have little faith in my ability to recognize palatalized
> consonants as such.

Even in an A-B comparison?

[Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups <google@rudhar.com>]

The palatalisation can be only slight sometimes, and difficult to
hear for us. The non-palatals are slightly or heavily velarised, and
what's essential is the difference. For example in the Russian
word for "we", "my", the velarisation is very strong. Cf. mir, meaning
world or peace.

[Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups <google@rudhar.com>]

Here https://www.howtopronounce.com/russian/znamensky I hear
Znaminsky, with the e higher than I'd expect, no palatalisation of the
m, and a clear velarisation of the z and n.

[Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups <google@rudhar.com>]

Difficult to organise. A vowel є never occurs in that position,
and hardly every occurs in the language at all.

Russian phonology is quite complicated, with quite some vowel
changes in stressed and unstressed positions.

The name Navalny is interesting in this respect: the l is palatalised,
the n is not. When I heard a native or bilingual say it,
it was audible. I know who it was that said it, but not her
name. Will look up. I do remember where I mentioned it, in
a different forum.

[Ruud Harmsen]

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 07:15:40 -0700 (PDT): "Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups
<goo...@rudhar.com>" <goo...@rudhar.com> scribeva:

>The name Navalny is interesting in this respect: the l is palatalised,
>the n is not. When I heard a native or bilingual say it,
>it was audible. I know who it was that said it, but not her
>name. Will look up. I do remember where I mentioned it, in
>a different forum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSNo2FPQDQw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Ioffe
Julia Ioffe.

She must be fully bilingual, and pronounces Russian names with fully
retained Russian pronunciation in the middle of her English sentences,
also with native pronunciation.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

[Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups <google@rudhar.com>]

On Thursday, June 16, 2022 at 4:21:22 PM UTC+2, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> Thu, 16 Jun 2022 07:15:40 -0700 (PDT): "Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups
> <goo...@rudhar.com>" <goo...@rudhar.com> scribeva:
> >The name Navalny is interesting in this respect: the l is palatalised,
> >the n is not. When I heard a native or bilingual say it,
> >it was audible. I know who it was that said it, but not her
> >name. Will look up. I do remember where I mentioned it, in
> >a different forum.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSNo2FPQDQw

26:55 Sergey Skripal, Серге́й Скрипа́ль, [sʲɪrˈɡʲej skrʲɪˈpalʲ]
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergej_Skripal

33:31 Andrei Kostin, Андрей Костин.

Does she say "silowiki" in English, or does it happen to sound
nearly the same in the two languages? Familiar names like
Putin and Kremlin she clearly say in English, not Russian.

I can't find where she says Naval'ny, Нава́льный.

[Ross Clark]

On 17/06/2022 2:08 a.m., Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups

I hear this as initial-stressed, with the m palatalized.
[i] for written /e/ in unstressed syllables after palatalized consonant
is perfectly standard Russian pronunciation.

Peter did not mention where the stress falls in the doctor's
pronunciation. I wonder whether he has simply accomodated himself (after
30 years) to a typical spelling pronunciation that English speakers
would hazard, with stress on the -men-?

[Ruud Harmsen]

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 09:25:14 +1200: Ross Clark <benl...@ihug.co.nz>
scribeva:

>On 17/06/2022 2:08 a.m., Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups
><goo...@rudhar.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, June 16, 2022 at 4:04:16 PM UTC+2, Ruud Harmsen via Google Groups <goo...@rudhar.com> wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, June 15, 2022 at 7:46:42 PM UTC+2, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>>>> I have a new doctor -- Vladimir Znamensky -- and I assumed the
>>>> m is soft, i.e. Znam'ensky -- but I asked, and he pronounced it
>>>> completely unmarked. So I asked him to write it in Cyrillic --

>>>> ??????????.
>>>>
>>>> No ?, no hard sign. (Which seems to occur, post-1917,

>>>> only after a prefix.)
>>>>
>>>> Is everything I've read about Russian vowel letters wrong? Or
>>>> is he from a minority dialect? He has a slight accent, as if he
>>>> immigrated around age 12 or so, maybe 30 years ago, when
>>>> that presumably ceased being a problem.
>>> The palatalisation can be only slight sometimes, and difficult to
>>> hear for us. The non-palatals are slightly or heavily velarised, and
>>> what's essential is the difference. For example in the Russian
>>> word for "we", "my", the velarisation is very strong. Cf. mir, meaning
>>> world or peace.
>>
>> Here https://www.howtopronounce.com/russian/znamensky I hear
>> Znaminsky, with the e higher than I'd expect, no palatalisation of the
>> m, and a clear velarisation of the z and n.
>>
>
>I hear this as initial-stressed,

Now that you mention it, yes, I hear that too.

>with the m palatalized.
>[i] for written /e/ in unstressed syllables after palatalized consonant
>is perfectly standard Russian pronunciation.

It's [I], I think, not [i].

[Peter T. Daniels]

Yes, stress on -men-.

His cardiology colleague calls him Doctor Vlad. Or sometimes,
he said, Doctor Z. "Baruchin" is no picnic, either, so maybe he
ought to be "Doctor Mitch." (But clearly a native-speaker, so
maybe it got "changed at Ellis Island" generations ago. (Usually
such changes didn't happen upon immigration, but when emigrants
boarded ships in places like Bremen and Lübeck and Danzig and
were logged by less-than-careful ships' clerks.))

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2022-06-17, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> Peter did not mention where the stress falls in the doctor's
>> pronunciation. I wonder whether he has simply accomodated himself (after
>> 30 years) to a typical spelling pronunciation that English speakers
>> would hazard, with stress on the -men-?
>
> Yes, stress on -men-.

Well, it's Зна́менский in Russian. Initial stress.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9

[Ross Clark]

I wanted to derive it from знамя (<*zna-men-) 'flag, banner', but
according to ru.wiki it's actually from знамение, from the name of a
celebrated icon of the Virgin. My little Ru-En dictionary translates
this as 'sign', but in exactly what sense isn't clear. "Signs and wonders"?

[Peter T. Daniels]

Google Translate says icon = значок, where -chok looks like
a suffix, and sign = знак, so it could be that kind of sign (a
specific icon), but the sign of "signs and wonders" could be
omen = предзнаменование (and there's the знам- again).

[Arnaud Fournet]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I tend to think that palatalization is typical of North-western upper-class Russian.
I think the other speakers have much less explicit palalization.

[Peter T. Daniels]

When the great Soviet Orientalist I. M. Diakonoff was finally
allowed to come to Chicago to receive an honorary degree in
1988, he gave a talk at a meeting I was organizing. Afterward I
made a little joke about having just one letter for the sequence
shch, and he (from Leningrad) said, No no, that's just the
Moscow pronunciation ...

So in Znamensky's case it might be _both_ the dialect of his
parents, _and_ heritage-language loss.

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2022-06-21, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> When the great Soviet Orientalist I. M. Diakonoff was finally
> allowed to come to Chicago to receive an honorary degree in
> 1988, he gave a talk at a meeting I was organizing. Afterward I
> made a little joke about having just one letter for the sequence
> shch, and he (from Leningrad) said, No no, that's just the
> Moscow pronunciation ...

The standard Russian pronunciation of щ, based on the Muscovite
dialect, is [ɕː] according to Wikipedia's article on Russian
phonology.

In Ukrainian it's supposedly still [ʃtʃ]... and I think that or
maybe [ɕtɕ] is what I hear for instance in the second stanza of
this very catchy song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3FGWPMjl6M
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bayraktar-bayraktar.html

For people who, unlike me, know Russian and are interested in its
dialects, the interviews with Russian POWs on YouTube (e.g. on
Volodymyr Zolkin's channel) should be a bonanza. Russian soldiers
in Ukraine are overwhelmingly drawn from the poorer, rural areas
of the country, with barely anybody from Moscow or St. Petersburg.