# Post-tonic pronunciation of e.



## Encolpius

Good morning ladies & gentlemen, there is not much to learn even in A Comprehensive Russian Grammar by Terence Wade about the *pronunciation of post-tonic e*, quote: in post-tonic position e is pronounced [ɪ], поле [pol'ɪ], that's all. Since -e is an extremely common ending in Russian declension and conjugation I am rather confused, because I mostly do not hear that i-like shwa. I hear open, closed e, sometimes some people really say (I hear) that i-like shwa. Wiktionary is fantastic there are many IPA transcribed words. I had studied these two words: республике [rʲɪˈspublʲɪkʲ*e*] - why not [ɪ] at the end??? --- пишете [ˈpʲiʂɨtʲe] - why is the first e shwa the final e???? Thank you so much for your cooperation and have a nice weekend. Enco.


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## Awwal12

Wiktionary cannot be used as a reliable source of Russian transcriptions (those are mostly written by native speakers, with all the unfortunate perception-related consequences as far as Russian phonology goes).
I'd generally describe the neutral post-tonic sound I produce after soft consonants as something between [ə] and [ɪ], but actually proving that would require considerable experimentation.
It should be mentioned that, according to many sources, noun inflections can appear somewhat under-reduced, although other scholars doubt that the phenomenon exists in normal speech.


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## nizzebro

Eventually, it depends on a person - whether they adjust the sound or not, invoking in their mind the actual form.
For that республике/республики, they might do that half-consciously providing the sample, or, in case of  natural speech, they could be focused on being clear, marking the number of the noun.
Besides that , these 'post-tonics' are not always equally reduced and can get some stress because of intonation variations on the sentence level, like emphasis caused by shifts in the informational structure.


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## pimlicodude

The English Wiktionary varies from the Russian one, and is less reliable than the Russian one. It rather strangely gives three transcriptions for поле:

[ˈpolʲe]
[ˈpolʲə] (slightly dated)
[ˈpolʲɪ] (esp. when followed by other words)


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## Encolpius

Awwal12 said:


> Wiktionary cannot be used as a reliable source of Russian transcriptions....


Can you recommend a better source? 



nizzebro said:


> Eventually, it depends on a person - whether they adjust the sound or not, invoking in their mind the actual form.
> For that республике/республики, they might do that half-consciously providing the sample, or, in case of  natural speech, they could be focused on being clear, marking the number of the noun.
> Besides that , these 'post-tonics' are not always equally reduced and can get some stress because of intonation variations on the sentence level, like emphasis caused by shifts in the informational structure.



Yes, that was my feeling, too. It depends on the person. Is there something like formal, standard pronunciation in Russian at all? You know there is Queen's English, RP pronunciation, etc? Any idea where (on Youtube) we could listen to clear, nice Russian pronunciation? I mean some recitation of poems by famous actors, etc?


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## nizzebro

Encolpius said:


> It depends on the person. Is there something like formal, standard pronunciation in Russian at all? You know there is Queen's English, RP pronunciation, etc? Any idea where (on Youtube) we could listen to clear, nice Russian pronunciation? I mean some recitation of poems by famous actors, etc?


Well, I meant specifically those unstressed vowels. Those е/и anyway produce their own 'shwa' compared to that of 'a/о'. Ideally, in each case, it should be something in between, but, in such ideal case they would be also completely reduced and no sound be present. Roughly -  the less they are reduced the closer they are to their stressed counterpart.  I was a little inaccurate in my wording; it depends not that on individuality - but rather on how much that vowel is reduced by the speaker - that could be the result  of his intent to be more clear, or, be caused by speech tempo or the sentence intonation condensed around that word. This is not not something language-specific: I guess, e.g. English flap T presence also depends on tempo, focus etc. The only factor of individuality is that  an educated speaker would probably be more focused on textual image of that he or she is uttering.

I'd say there is no such thing as high class pronunciation etc. in Russian, in general.  Distinctions of the kind might appear in vocabulary and syntax but it is a sophisticated topic which cannot be formulated in a clear way.

Just take any video with a more or less well-balanced neutral speech and no speed-ups.  I'm sure the same text pronounced in the same manner by two speakers with no speech defects, will be not so much different.


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## Awwal12

Encolpius said:


> Can you recommend a better source?


I'm afraid I cannot. 
Definitely not something of Wiktionary's magnitude.


Encolpius said:


> You know there is Queen's English, RP pronunciation, etc? Any idea where (on Youtube) we could listen to clear, nice Russian pronunciation?


Russian is something much more homogeneous than English (even British English). Marked dialectal features in pronunciation are comparatively rare (the main source of them now is Russian of Ukraine rather than regiolects of Russia, it seems). So it mostly boils down just to how clear one's pronunciation is. Most newspeople and some politicians may be decent examples of more or less standard, literary Russian pronunciation.


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## Encolpius

Yes, it exists in English for 100%, but you know, there are many many languages (Hungarian, Czech, Italian) where it is recommended to pronounce all the vowels correctly. My mother tongue (and maybe Czech, too) must be the reason I am asking questions like that. But interesting comments indeed.


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## Encolpius

Awwal12 said:


> Most newspeople and some politicians may be decent examples of more or less standard, literary Russian pronunciation.


Thank God I am not interested in that stuff, so it is a rather wrong source for me.


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## Encolpius

By the way, do not you have poetry reciting contents in Russian schools? We have had (I am not sure about Czechia), it is all about how nice you can pronounce.


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## lena55313

Encolpius said:


> Yes, that was my feeling, too. It depends on the person. Is there something like formal, standard pronunciation in Russian at all? You know there is Queen's English, RP pronunciation, etc? Any idea where (on Youtube) we could listen to clear, nice Russian pronunciation? I mean some recitation of poems by famous actors, etc?


I know that they learn standard  pronunciation in theater academies.
any study books like Сценическая речь could be useful (chapters about Орфоэпия). 

I know only one strict rule that always works. Unstressed O turnes to A, and unstressed Е turns to И in the roots of the words. I'm not sure whether it works for endings or not. 
We definitely have audiobooks and films where you could hear good pronunciation. 
You can just choose a book to read and try to find its audio version.


Encolpius said:


> in post-tonic position e is pronounced [ɪ], поле [pol'ɪ], that's all.


I don't think this rule works for endings. It's rather for roots. 
I say на поле, with E at the end.


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## Awwal12

lena55313 said:


> I say на поле, with E at the end.


How can you be sure of that? 


Encolpius said:


> By the way, do not you have poetry reciting contents in Russian schools?


We definitely had none in our time.


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## nizzebro

Beside that, we should take into account the preceding consonant with respect to typical clusters used in language.
We use ке and ки - but кя is out of the 'matrix' of Russian phonetics, so республики and республики are about e-i variation or their resemblance,
But for unstressed -ле, there is not only -ли but also -ля. And physically, it takes less energy for unstressed ля/ле to be produced.  There is поле and поля - but no form with -ли; so both variants tend to take the e-a position. However, there is a pretty rare female name Поля. In a situation where I had to use this name in the genitive, e.g. "возьми книгу у Поли" I would likely make it more closed and stressed almost like the normal stressed и.


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## Encolpius

Thanks for your comments, after having been doing some research I think I will listen to Смоктуновский, I hope you all agree he might have had proper Russian pronunciation.  And there are some interesting lines by Пушкин online.


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## lena55313

Awwal12 said:


> How can you be sure of that?


I recorded my voice and listened it. Еven if it was not Е it surely wasn't И.


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## Awwal12

lena55313 said:


> I recorded my voice and listened it. Еven if it was not Е it surely wasn't И.


It surely wasn't the stressed allophone of /и/, but the point is, can it be differentiated from the /и/ normally appearing in the same position?..


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## nizzebro

I think it depends on a word which again is about how much that syllable is reduced.
I tried to record this: "У кого? У Коли. Кому отдать? Коле. Кто? Коля" a number of times -  in a vivid tempo and without  focusing too much on the meanings. After that, I isolated Коли/Коле/Коля, auditioning them apart from their phrases. Коля sounds as is, Коле - sometimes as is and sometimes as if Коля; Коли  - sometimes as Коле and sometimes as either Коли or Коле.

But after that, I recorded this: "Нескончаемые баррели нефти. В тринадцатом барреле нефти" - also several times, and, in this case - indeed both are that between е and и.


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## pimlicodude

nizzebro said:


> I think it depends on a word which again is about how much that syllable is reduced.
> I tried to record this: "У кого? У Коли. Кому отдать? Коле. Кто? Коля" a number of times -  in a vivid tempo and without  focusing too much on the meanings. After that, I isolated Коли/Коле/Коля, auditioning them apart from their phrases. Коля sounds as is, Коле - sometimes as is and sometimes as if Коля; Коли  - sometimes as Коле and sometimes as either Коли or Коле.
> 
> But after that, I recorded this: "Нескончаемые баррели нефти. В тринадцатом барреле нефти" - also several times, and, in this case - indeed both are that between е and и.


It could be a bit like the unstressed i in English. That used to be a clear /ɪ/, eg in the second syllable of "elephant", pronounced "elifant". But many people have /ə/ there, and many have something in-between (maybe /ɘ/ or /ï/).


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## nizzebro

pimlicodude said:


> It could be a bit like the unstressed i in English. That used to be a clear /ɪ/, eg in the second syllable of "elephant", pronounced "elifant". But many people have /ə/ there, and many have something in-between (maybe /ɘ/ or /ï/).


Yes, I think the matter is that the vocal apparatus can't change it state fast, so it chooses compromise positions.
Anyway I can't get why the last е in my ба́рреле tends to be i-like much more than that in поле, Коле.
Maybe its is just a side effect of airflow fall (e.g.  some middle range frequencies fade quickly - but these freq-s are the feature of /e/).


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## Sobakus

See this thread: Reduction of <е> in noun endings
And the one linked in it: Endings -ия, -яя (pronunciation)
And the further links in that.
Also see my replies in this thread, if you can filter past the unhelpfully convoluted back-and-forth: pronunciation of курение. I give a summary in #11.


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## Encolpius

Thanks, Sobakus, very interesting links.


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