I took Russian for four semesters in college and still never feel like I got the hang of pronouncing final soft alveolar consonants in Russian. Sample words would include:
лошадь “horse” площадь “square” день “day” читать “to read” (or any of the zillions of verbs ending in **-ть ** )
Now then. Over those four semesters, I had three instructors – one native Russian speaker, one older American, and a younger American who had learned Russian either in the military or in some kind of national service (he said that he attended the immersion school in Monterey, CA).
Anyway – the native speaker and the older American sounded like they just pronounced these consonants as their hard counterparts (more or less). They allowed us to pronounce them the same way, and never corrected us for doing so. But the younger American instructor would pronounce final -ть and -дь as if they were spelled -тс and -дз. Well, that last fricative bit would be brief and fleeting, but still salient.
For words like день, all three pronounced it as if it were just spelled ден … or maybe I just wasn’t picking up the difference.
So, the question is – just what is the correct pronunciation of these final soft consonants? I’ve read explanations that suggests adding a “y-like” glide after the consonant … but this seems to add an extra syllable sounding something like “yuh” to the end of the word. Is there another explanation that can get a native English speaker closer to the mark?
“Alveolar consonants” isn’t really accurate. Anyway, the correct answer to your question is simply a matter of moving the contact point of your tongue to a different part of the roof of your mouth. How this exactly sounds would probably be different for different people; I think it sounds most like the “y” sound.
Nothing screams more of a foreign accent than pronouncing hard consonants as soft or vice-versa. The way I would pronounce “ден” is very different from the way I would pronounce “день”, but I think that difference is only audible if you are used to making a distinction. I just paid careful attention and I do not necessarily think it has anything to do with tongue positioning.
I made a really crappy recording of me pronouncing the four words you mentioned, first correctly and then followed as if the soft sign was omitted at the end. Notice that I couldn’t help but shift emphasis a little on some of them, I am not sure for the linguistic reason (if any) for this, but it seems a syllable is emphasized differently if it ends in a soft consonant as opposed to a hard one.
P.S. Mispronouncing hard consonants as soft and soft as hard is the primary way to do an anglophonic accent in Russian. I’ve yet to meet a non-native Russian speaker whose first language was English who could pronounce “Девочка” without it sounding like “Дьэвочка”
I missed the part of your OP that asked for a description of how:
The way I would explain how to pronounce the end of “читать” for example is:
Say “chi” as in “chip”, “tu” as in “tummy” (or “ta” as in “tambourine”, depending on your english dialect), and to pronounce the end consonant pretend you’re starting to say “tick” as in “tick-tock” but you don’t quite get to the vowel part before you stop. In other words if you broke apart “tick” into t and ick and pronounced separately, you’d wind up with something sounding like “tuh-ick”, but if you let some of the “i” migrate over to the t you can pronounce it separately “t’” and “ick” and have it come out as a bifurcated “tick”, that first “t’” is the soft consonant sound at the end of “читать” :dubious: I think I suck at explaining this.
Not to nitpick, but it should be noted that it absolutely has everything to do with tongue positioning. I get the point you’re trying to make, though, which I assume is that focusing on where your tongue is isn’t the best way to attempt a native pronunciation. Your explanation of читать makes perfect sense.
The soft consonant has the veriest ghost of a hint of a -y sound (note that’s not an -ee sound but the consonantal Y of Yitzhak Yakovovich. It’s properly called palatalization. In precise Russian diction, that comes across clearly. In casual conversation, it’s slurred to a greater or lesser extent (compare precise Russian for a formal “Hello,” Zdravstuityeh with conversational Zdrastyeh. (Accent on the first syllable in both cases.)
I’ve heard two ways of rendering the infinitive ending-ть: (1) Sound it as a very clipped -ch sound, where you render the initial -t of the affricate but not the -sh that follows. Apparently the plosive half of the affricate is slightly palatalized in standard English diction, though I’d never have guessed it. (2) Compare how you’d say “tattoo” and the nonce word *tattue, sounding the latter like “Tuesday.” Now, stop short before the --oo sound.
Use the same trick for -дь, substituting a clipped -j (or -dge) or the distinction between “do [something]” and “due [something].”
-нь is in my mind very easy to render; almost everyone knows Spanish words like mañana with -ñ present. Unless you insist on rendering mañana like a Jamaican saying “mahn Yonnuh” you have the palatalized -нь in an already-learned format.
In the English dialects that I’m familiar with, there’s a clear difference between “mill” and the first syllable of “million”; the latter is the palatalized L sound of -ль. If you speak any conversational Spanish and know it from a Hispanoamericano source, the sound inbetween -lly- and -y- with whch you render -ll- is close enough to be understood.
I forgot “aboot” Canadian usage. Just south of the border where I grew up, and here in NC, I hear a slight but clear palatalization – not “Toozday” nor “T’yoozday” but a sort of “T[sup]y[/sup]oozday” sound, which is why I chose that distinguisher.
I don’t follow this. How are they different? Д is always palatalized before е. Дь is always palatalized in any position. If I understand correctly, there are three ways to trigger palatalization:
The vowels е, ё, и, ю, я automatically palatalize the preceding consonant.
So does the palatal semivowel й.
The letter ь (miagkii znak ‘soft sign’) indicates when a palatalized consonant precedes one of the non-palatal vowels а, о, у, ы, э (or zero vowel, i.e. before another consonant or word-final).
The only difference between the vowels е and э being the palatal onglide in the former which is absent in the latter – but the sign ь supplies it when otherwise lacking. In both your examples the letter Д is palatalized, so where’s the difference?
(I am not a student of Russian, just a dabbler.)
… interesting. To my ears, “Toozday” is absolutely the default, coast-to-coast American pronunciation (I’m from Louisiana). I’ve heard Americans pronounce it as “T[sup]y[/sup]oozday” … but only in something of a “Frasier Crane” accent. Otherwise, for me, “T[sup]y[/sup]oozday” is heavily marked as British pronunciation.
Eh. It’s all in what you’re used to hearing.
Groman, Polycarp … your explanations were crystal clear. Thanks for your help. I am resigned that as an English-speaking “listener”, I will always hear myself throwing an extra syllable at the end of a lot of these Russian words. Even if I’m really not.
For me, the Spanish “ñ” loses saliency at the end of a word (unless the next word begins with a vowel). It just sounds to me like regular ol’ “n” at the end of a word, unless the palatization is exaggerated into an apparent quasi-syllable.
I first learned from a native speaker, and to my ear she did the dz / ts thing too with дь & ть, so your Monterey guy isn’t necessarily off base. I asked her about it at the time, and I can’t remember what she said but at any rate it satisfied me. Something about not really being a [z] or [s], it just sounded like it. The other native speakers did not do this (I guess it was a regional thing), but it was the only way I could hear the distinction, so now I do it too.
A lot of English-speakers do the same thing to the Czech palatal [r], f’r instance Dvorak comes out Dvor-zhak, with a phantom [zh] coming from the way they hear the palatal [r].
If only it were that simple, but unfortunately there’s basically different degrees of softness. I really good example of this is the fact that the word devil is spelled
“дьявол” and would be pronounced differently were it spelled “дявол” or “дьавол”. Each of these three spellings imparts a different palatalization upon the poor old “Д”, and the two incorrect ones would sound like slight foreign accents in speech.
I think there is another aspect at play as well, “дявол” implies a soft “Д” and a single vowel sound after it, while “дьявол” implies a standalone soft “Д” and a ‘scoop up’ to a vowel sound after it. Basically “дь” by itself is softened slightly differently than “д” in “дя”, so when something is written “дья” it implies that you use both ‘softenings’ and slide in between them before going into the “я” vowel sound.
To borrow from Polycarp’s example this difference to me sounds very similar to the difference between English “nya” (“нья”), as in Enya the singer, and Spanish “ña” (“ня”), as in enye followed by an a, at least the way Californians pronounce those.
I think that might be a difference of regional dialects. I always emphasize the trailing hard “Д” so “Ленинград” has a different ending consonant from “брат”, but ‘Moscow’ accent is sometimes funny with subtle things like that. The people in the boonies always find the fact that I pronounce “корова” as Kah-rah-wah (and not Ko-rove-ah as they do) especially hilarious.
And then there’s the fun of words like съесть “to eat” (?), where the hard sign keeps the initial consonant (really a prefix here, IIRC) unpalatized. But there is a “y-glide” following, thanks to the “е”.
A somewhat unrelated question just occured to me, how does one properly express perfect infinitives from Russian in English? My instinct tells me to translate есть as “to eat” and съесть as “to will have eaten” or “to have eaten”, but that’s just… awkward because it’s not really a future perfect form of the verb nor is it a pluperfect form of the verb.
Maybe translate as “to eat up”? Although that’s awful sloppy, too.
If you’re teaching, it’s important to impress the idea the imperfective verbs usually focus on the process as a whole, and perfective verbs tend to focus on the starting or stopping of the process (and are loaded with data about the result or intended result) and don’t necessarily translate easily to English.
