# Proto-Slavic: ь and ъ



## phosphore

Hello everyone,

In a few books I took a look at the two short high vowels that formed part of the Proto-Slavic vocalism were represented with the signs /ь/ and /ъ/, even when the rest was in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I was trying to find some information about their actual value when I realised someone here may already know the answer.

So my question is what was the phonetic value of the vowels /ь/ and /ъ/ in Proto-Slavic? I know these two vowels come from Proto-Indo-European short /i/ and short /u/. Maybe they were pronounced as [ɪ] and [ʊ]? That seems plausible to me but the problem is my book says that the latter was not rounded, while [ʊ] is very much rounded.

Thanks in advance.


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## DenisBiH

Maybe sokol could create a trace on EHL for this? I'm also interested.


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## phosphore

I am disappointed. I saw you had replied and I though you had an answer. 

I realised this part about /ъ/ being pronounced as [ʊ] was nonsense as soon as I posted it, knowing that Proto-Indo-European long /u:/ gave /ɨ/ in Proto-Slavic. That leaves me with no intelligent guess on the pronunciation of /ъ/. Maybe it was the near-close central unrounded vowel?


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## DenisBiH

Matasović doesn't know either. 



> Točan izgovor »poluglasova« nije poznat, a mogao se i razlikovati u dijelovima općeslavenskoga područja. Koncem općeslavenskoga razdoblja poluglasovi su se izgubili, ili su se stopili s drugim samoglasnicima (v. § 183).



Given how Romanian borrowed from Slavic, and that it has the close central unrounded vowel (î/â) perhaps one could look at Slavic borrowings that contain it.


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## phosphore

I hate it when they do that.

For that matter the pronunciation of /a/ is not _exactly_ known either. It may have been [a] or [ɑ] or something in between.

Now that you mention Romanian, I saw that both /ь/ and /ъ/ were sometimes rendered as <i> or <e> and that /ъ/ was also rendered with <o>. But that doesn't help much and I don't know any Romanian.


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## DenisBiH

I know some, but not nearly enough for any serious examination. Here is just something I remembered:

*tъrgъ - târg (as in Târgu Mureş)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Târgu_Mureş



> The current name _Târgu Mureş_, whose historical form was _Oşorhei_, is the equivalent of _Marosvásárhely_ as Romanian 'târg' means 'market' and Hungarian 'vásárhely' means 'marketplace'. Alternate Romanian spellings of its name are _Târgu-Mureş_,_Tîrgu Mureş_ and _Tîrgu-Mureş_.


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## phosphore

Interesting. Do you happen to know some historical phonology of Romanian to check if the phoneme /ɨ/ was well established at the time of Slavic borrowings?


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## DenisBiH

No, unfortunately not. And the Romanian cyrillic alphabet doesn't help much.



> Ъ ъ ă, ŭ[7]
> 
> Ы ы â, î, ĭ, ŭ[7]
> 
> Ь ь ă, ŭ, ĭ[7]


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## phosphore

I forgot that Romanian wasn't attested before the 14th or 15th century, right? so there is no way we could know its vocalism at any point before that.


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## CapnPrep

As far as I know, the precise phonetic value of ь and ъ in Proto-Slavic has not been conclusively reconstructed (which partly explains the practice of using the Cyrillic symbols, or ĭ and ŭ, in the middle of otherwise IPA-like transcriptions).

Some more information can be found in this EHL thread:
Vowel reduction in Russian noun declination


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## sokol

In my experience the value of ь and ъ mostly is given as ĭ and ŭ, as the Captain already said, and phonetic descriptions usually give values of centralised vowels [ɪ ɐ] which are believed to be the sounds used in the Balkans region in Proto-Slavic time - but to my knowledge the Captain is right, the exact value of those vowels in Common Slavic is not quite clear.

The only thing which is sure is that they were both vowels, with one (ь) being "palatal" and the other (ъ) being "non-palatal". Which of course is not much, as it is a knowledge Russians learn with their mother tongue. 

_Trunte, Ein praktisches Lehrbuch des Kirchenslavischen in 30 Lektionen_ (1990) mentions the theory that the vowel quality of ъ (in later times and on the Balkans definitely [ɐ]) originally _might_ have been [ʊ] (p. 12).

Of course, considering that they developped from /i u/ it would be only logical that the original sound had been [ɪ] and [ʊ], as you suggested yourself, but as Trunte (quote above) only gives this as "possibles" this definitely was not widely accepted by 1990 - however, this might have changed: I'm not really up-to-date on that.


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## robbie_SWE

I think that using _târg_ (or *tъrgъ) as an example is not all that useful. According to the linguist Sorin Paliga, who has done extensive work analyzing vocabulary of possible Thracian origin, has come to the conclusion that _târg_ is not inherently a word of Slavic origin. He points out multiple toponyms in the Balkans containing this formation from before the Proto-Slavic influence (Paliga, 2006, p. 191). Since I can't post citations from his book, I'll provide the page number and a link to the online version. 
 
Returning to the subject I would believe it to be of greater interest to consider why the phoneme occurs in e.g. the Romanian verb *a omorî*, "to kill" (presumably from Slavic _umoriti_). It is a voiced vowel, but I don’t understand why it developed in this way from a morphological and phonetic point of view. 
 
What do you guys think? 

 robbie


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## Gita-Etymology

We were told in school that ъ was pronounced like schwa. Is this not the case in Bulgarian? It've have had to have been pretty central if it was going to give _e_ in West Slavic, _o _in East Slavic, and _a _in South Slavic when stressed. 

I guess it goes without saying that the vowel was super-short, right?


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## Outsider

If ь originated palatalized consonants in modern Slavic languages, it seems to be expected that it was some kind of short "i", some kind of short front high vowel to be more exact.

In Russian, ъ indicates a lack of palatalization. In languages that contrast palatalized with non-palatalized consonants, often the non-palatalized ones are velarized or labialized. This suggests that ъ would have been previously some kind of short back or low vowel, some kind of short "u" or "o" (or even "a").


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## sokol

Outsider said:


> If ь originated palatalized consonants in modern Slavic languages, it seems to be expected that it was some kind of short "i", some kind of short front high vowel to be more exact.
> 
> In Russian, ъ indicates a lack of palatalization. In languages that contrast palatalized with non-palatalized consonants, often the non-palatalized ones are velarized or labialized. This suggests that ъ would have been previously some kind of short back or low vowel, some kind of short "u" or "o" (or even "a").



Yes of course, and that was what this discussion was about previously - but without saying so in such clear words as you did: so you summarised pretty good the gist of this discussion so far, understandable also for those not too familiar with Slavic languages.

The _fact_ of palatalisation and _lack of it_ clearly indicates that not only in Southern Slavic but surely in all Slavic languages (and with that Common Slavic) the vowel value of ь must have been palatal, and that of ъ must not have been.
Also, it is clear that both indeed _were_ vowels, even though this is no longer the case in Russian where it is only a (non)-palatalisation-marker (and still written as such).


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## phosphore

Beekes says in _Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction_ that /ь/ and /ъ/ were pronounced like the vowels in _bit_ and _cut_. He doesn't say however anything more on the subject.


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## se16teddy

When I studied Old Church Slavonic in the early eighties, our authority on such matters was Grigore Nandris's _Old Church Slavonic Grammar_. According to Nandris, they were 'reduced' vowels, pronounced as a very short i and very short u; I think this was true of Common Slavonic as well as Old Church Slavonic.  In OCS they had 'a tendency to disappear in weak positions and to become full vowels in strong positions'.


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