Please Transliterate This Russian Word

Factual Questions
1

соль

It means “salt.”

Thanks!

2

sol with an emphasis thingy on the end?

3

sol[sup]y[/sup]

Two points:

  1. Short O. The sound you want is about midway betweeen “oh” and “aw”, with both dounfd being dialectal variants.

  2. The final L is “palatalized” – said as though a Y is to immediately follow it. Try to hear, and to sense tongue motions, in the difference between “million” and “mill un-” – I feel my tongue hitting my palate further back in the first than in the second. That’s the sound you’re shooting for.

4

:o" both dounfd" --> “both sounds”:o

5

There is, of course, a difference between transliterating a word and trying to render its pronunciation intelligible. The general practice in translating Russian into English is to replace the ‘soft’ sign (which, as Polycarp notes, palatalizes the preceding consonant) with an apostrophe. Hence, sol’.