# prepositional of платье



## pimlicodude

Solzhenitsyn has в статском платьи, and there are other words in Two Hundred Years Together where an unexpected (for me) preposition in -и is given in that text. Am I right in saying that all neuter nouns in -е have a variant prepositional singular in -и? Or maybe only those in ье?


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## Rosett

pimlicodude said:


> в статском платьи,


Обе формы допустимы.

Морфологические и синтаксические свойства


падежед. ч.мн. ч.Им.пла́тьепла́тьяР.пла́тьяпла́тьевД.пла́тьюпла́тьямВ.пла́тьепла́тьяТв.пла́тьемпла́тьямиПр.пла́тье
пла́тьипла́тьях

Ср. с _лежать в забытьи (Пр.), впасть в забытьё (В.)_


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## Vadim K

pimlicodude said:


> an unexpected (for me) preposition in -и is given in that text.



Для меня тоже. Интуитивно я бы никогда не написал "_в платьи_". И если обратиться к правилам русского языка, то слова среднего рода, оканчивающиеся в именительном падеже на _-е_, относятся к существительным второго типа склонения. А существительные второго склонения в предложном падеже имеют окончания _-е_.

Но, судя по словарям, для слова "_платье_" возможны оба варианта окончаний, как _-е_, так и _-и_.

Я думаю, что основной причиной этой вариативности является то, что раньше в русском языке был _*местный *_падеж, у которого были другие окончания, нежели в предложном. Потом местный падеж слился с предложным падежом, но некоторые слова в современном русском языке продолжают иметь в предложном падеже окончания бывшего местного падежа. Ну или возможность употребления двух окончаний в предложном падеже. Возможно, это как раз тот случай.

Одним из ярких примеров употребления окончаний бывшего местного падежа в современном предложном падеже является употребление выражения "_в лесу_", а не "_в лесе_", как это требуют правила.

Кстати, мой браузер подчеркивает слово "_платьи_" красным цветом, как ошибку.


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## Rosett

Vadim K said:


> Слова среднего рода, оканчивающиеся в именительном падеже на -е, в русском языке относятся к существительным второго типа склонения


Существует более подробная классификация склонений по Зализняку, в которой _платье_ относится ко 2-му склонению типа 6*a(2).


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## pimlicodude

Rosett said:


> Существует более подробная классификация склонений по Зализняку, в которой _платье_ относится ко 2-му склонению типа 6*a(2).


в этой книге встречается также предложная форма в Закавказьи.


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## Rosett

pimlicodude said:


> в этой книге встречается также предложная форма в Закавказьи.


Сравнительная частота употребления обоих вариантов может варьировать, естественно.


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## Rosett

Vadim K said:


> Одним из ярких примеров употребления окончаний бывшего местного падежа в современном предложном падеже является употребление выражения "_в лесу_", а не "_в лесе_", как это требуют правила.


И тем не менее, существуют бесспорные примеры на _в лесе_:
В тёмном лесе, за лесью распашу ль я пашеньку... Текст русской народной песни «В тёмном лесе»


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## pimlicodude

Rosett said:


> И тем не менее, существуют бесспорные примеры на _в лесе_:
> В тёмном лесе, за лесью распашу ль я пашеньку... Текст русской народной песни «В тёмном лесе»


может быть, только когда прилагательное вступается? хотя, многие говорят в глазе а не в глазу.


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## Sobakus

While -ье is the commonly encountered spelling nowadays, in fact it's -ьи that reflects the real morphonology/target pronunciation. The Accusative в платье /е/ and the Prepositional в платье~и /и/ morphonologically contrast, just like в поле /е/ (Acc.) and в поле /и/ (Prep.), as discussed in the links I give in this message.


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## nizzebro

pimlicodude said:


> может быть, только когда прилагательное вступается? хотя, многие говорят в глазе а не в глазу.


"В глазе" sounds odd to me, at least if used in a common context - not biology.
Anyhow, the matter in general is indeed  whether we have a unitary adjectival complex denoting location, especially human location, as -у, or, the noun is focused on a specific entity (sort, class): I wouldn't be surprised with "в (таком) снеге" in a context where they study sorts of snow, and as well "в лесе" used in the second meaning of it, which is wood as material (referring to e.g. beetles living inside it). Similarly, it is "в сборочном цехе" normally, but  "Вася уже в цеху?" as a widely used colloquial form.

But in a song it could be an old or dialectal or author's form.


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## Rosett

nizzebro said:


> as well "в лесе" used in the second meaning of it, which is wood as material (referring to e.g. beetles living inside it). Similarly, it is "в сборочном цехе" normally, but "Вася уже в цеху?" as a widely used colloquial form.


_Лес_ can be in its first meaning, and prepositional case of it is still _в лесе_.
«Это же мой лес: с детства, знала каждую тропинку», – уговаривает себя, понимая, что дело не _в лесе_, не в воздухе, полном фитонцидов.»
But locative case can be both, _в лесу_ and _в лесе:_
«И вот он снова прозвучал
В _лесу прифронтовом,_
И каждый слушал и молчал
О чём-то дорогом._»_ (song)
But:
«Вновь зеленые шорохи _в лесе, _
Разогнали зимы тишину,
И холмы, и озера, и веси —
Молодую встречают весну.» (verses)


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## Eirwyn

Vadim K said:


> Я думаю, что основной причиной этой вариативности является то, что раньше в русском языке был _*местный *_падеж, у которого были другие окончания, нежели в предложном. Потом местный падеж слился с предложным падежом, но некоторые слова в современном русском языке продолжают иметь в предложном падеже окончания бывшего местного падежа. Ну или возможность употребления двух окончаний в предложном падеже. Возможно, это как раз тот случай.


/-и/ — это регулярное окончание дательного и местного падежей единственного числа слов типа «доля» в древнерусском языке. Формы на /-е/ появились как результат аналогии с твёрдым склонением, где было /-ѣ/. Если не считать (старый) звательный, то тысячу лет назад у нас был тот же набор из шести падежей, что и есть сейчас. Предполагать, что в период конкуренции старого и нового окончания, за ними была закреплена какая-то грамматическая функция по типу «в лесу» vs «в лесе» (это тоже изначально окончания одного и того же локатива из разных типов склонения), конечно, можно, но не очень-то и нужно.



Sobakus said:


> While -ье is the commonly encountered spelling nowadays, in fact it's -ьи that reflects the real morphonology/target pronunciation. The Accusative в платье /е/ and the Prepositional в платье~и /и/ morphonologically contrast, just like в поле /е/ (Acc.) and в поле /и/ (Prep.), as discussed in the links I give in this message.


Your personal "target pronunciation", I must clarify.


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## Sobakus

Eirwyn said:


> Your personal "target pronunciation", I must clarify.


This reads like a personal accusation. Please clarify further what you mean by that and what your evidence is.


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## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> This reads like a personal accusation. Please clarify further what you mean by that and what your evidence is.


He probably means there is some native variation. In any case, the fact that Solzhenitsyn writes these with -i shows that he too believed that there was an audible difference.


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## Eirwyn

Sobakus said:


> This reads like a personal accusation. Please clarify further what you mean by that and what your evidence is.


You speak of it as if it's some kind of a universal thing across the entire language, while it actually isn't. It clearly doesn't correspond to anything in Russian I'm used to speak and listen to, and it doesn't seem to follow the historical vowel opposition. At first I assumed that you use a system where post-tonic non-front <a>/<o> are analogically reconstructed and distinguished from front <e>/<i> (nom. <polʲo> being opposed to loc. <polʲe> makes a lot of sense morphologically), but what I saw in our previous discussion on this topic was a mishmash of seemingly random associations of the same "e" with different vague entities: "e" that is prototypically "a", "e" that is always "e", "e" that is always "i", "e" that can reduce etc. It could probably exist as a regiolect, but I doubt that such subtle and contextually dependent distinctions could be synchronized across the entire country.


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## pimlicodude

Eirwyn said:


> You speak of it as if it's some kind of a universal thing across the entire language, while it actually isn't. It clearly doesn't correspond to anything in Russian I'm used to speak and listen to, and it doesn't seem to follow the historical vowel opposition. At first I assumed that you use a system where post-tonic non-front <a>/<o> are analogically reconstructed and distinguished from front <e>/<i> (nom. <polʲo> being opposed to loc. <polʲe> makes a lot of sense morphologically), but what I saw in our previous discussion on this topic was a mishmash of seemingly random associations of the same "e" with different vague entities: "e" that is prototypically "a", "e" that is always "e", "e" that is always "i", "e" that can reduce etc. It could probably exist as a regiolect, but I doubt that such subtle and contextually dependent distinctions could be synchronized across the entire country.


But on Forvo, поле does sound like it has /e/, whereas в поле sounds like it has /i/, if you listen to the files offered there.


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## Sobakus

Eirwyn said:


> You speak of it as if it's some kind of a universal thing across the entire language, while it actually isn't. It clearly doesn't correspond to anything in Russian I'm used to speak and listen to, and it doesn't seem to follow the historical vowel opposition.


Do you not see the irony in rudely dismissing somone else's words as “my personal "target pronunciation"”, and going on to make unsubstantiated assertions based on personal anecdotes (“I'm used to speak and listen to”)? I asked for your evidence for a reason.

Meanwhile, the double irony is that your assertions here that amount to “армия and армии are morphonemically the same” are incomprehensibly false and their falsity can and has been trivially demonstrated even simply using Forvo, and will shortly be demonstrated further. Whatever you're describing isn't standard Russian and I doubt it's even your own speech. From plainly false statements like these:


> unstressed /e/ and /a/ had been merged in the standard pronunciation centuries ago


it looks like you're simply repeating a sloppy, false generalisation you read somewhere as dogma, without any understanding of the matter or doing any research. It also looks like you're confusing synchrony with diachrony.


Eirwyn said:


> At first I assumed that you use a system where post-tonic non-front <a>/<o> are analogically reconstructed and distinguished from front <e>/<i> (nom. <polʲo> being opposed to loc. <polʲe> makes a lot of sense morphologically), but what I saw in our previous discussion on this topic was a mishmash of seemingly random associations of the same "e" with different vague entities: "e" that is prototypically "a", "e" that is always "e", "e" that is always "i", "e" that can reduce etc. It could probably exist as a regiolect, but I doubt that such subtle and contextually dependent distinctions could be synchronized across the entire country.


Clearly you haven't looked at the paper I linked you in that discussion, Bethin C.Y. (2012), On paradigm uniformity and contrast in Russian vowel reduction. You can access it on scihub, but here's the abstract. I quote:


> There is a systematic sub-phonemic contrast between [ɪ] (approximately F 1=300, F2=2000; Thelin 1971) and [ә] (approx. F1=375, F2=1775; Thelin 1971) in a set of inflectional suffixes where [ә] is found instead of the expected [ɪ], exemplified by the forms in (1) below. This reflects the standard pronunciation of Russian as described in Avanesov (1972:69-72, 152-62), Kuzmina (1968), Timberlake (2004:48-51), and holds for most speakers of CSR.


What you've rudely dismissed as “my personal "target pronunciation"” is actually “the standard pronunciation of Russian” that “holds for most speakers of CSR” according to instrumental studies and standard language manuals. Moreover, it has been noted and discussed on this forum before, including with you as a participant.

Bethin's paper recognises that the phenomenon is complex, variable, multilevel, and that previous attempts at reducing it to some simple factor have been unsatisfactory. The author then ventures to explain the phenomenon by using the notions of Paradigm Uniformity and Paradigmatic Contrast, couched in the Optimality Theory. But what you write betrays a larger problem than simply failing to read your interlocutor's links; or an inability to properly separate synchrony and diachrony; or lack of knowledge of linguistics. It betrays a “logic first reality later”, “if I don't understand why it's happening, it isn't happening” approach, or on one word, dogma yet again. This is a classic artifact of school prescriptivism, wherein people are trained to resolve a cognitive dissonance by conforming their perception of reality to their (externally acquired) beliefs about how reality should be. In contrast to this, when a scientist sees a complex phenomenon without a satisfactory explanation, they attempt to find one, and they expect it to be complex. Above all, a scientst makes sure they understand the topic before making dismissive, personally-directed comments.

Therefore I can confidently repeat that whatever you're describing isn't standard Russian and I doubt it's even your own speech – it's so outlandish. There does exist variation in the neuter acc./prep. endings, but I cannot stress enough that anyone asserting that армия and армии, синее and синие don't morphonemically contrast and aren't underlied by two different target pronunciations should be dismissed out of hand as having no grounding in reality.


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## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> Do you not see the irony in rudely dismissing somone else's words as “my personal "target pronunciation"”, and going on to make unsubstantiated assertions based on personal anecdotes (“I'm used to speak and listen to”)? I asked for your evidence for a reason.
> 
> Meanwhile, the double irony is that your assertions here that amount to “армия and армии are morphonemically the same” are incomprehensibly false and their falsity can and has been trivially demonstrated even simply using Forvo, and will shortly be demonstrated further. Whatever you're describing isn't standard Russian and I doubt it's even your own speech. From plainly false statements like these:
> 
> it looks like you're simply repeating a sloppy, false generalisation you read somewhere as dogma, without any understanding of the matter or doing any research. It also looks like you're confusing synchrony with diachrony.
> 
> Clearly you haven't looked at the paper I linked you in that discussion, Bethin C.Y. (2012), On paradigm uniformity and contrast in Russian vowel reduction. You can access it on scihub, but here's the abstract. I quote:
> 
> What you've rudely dismissed as “my personal "target pronunciation"” is actually “the standard pronunciation of Russian” that “holds for most speakers of CSR” according to instrumental studies and standard language manuals. Moreover, it has been noted and discussed on this forum before, including with you as a participant.
> 
> Bethin's paper recognises that the phenomenon is complex, variable, multilevel, and that previous attempts at reducing it to some simple factor have been unsatisfactory. The author then ventures to explain the phenomenon by using the notions of Paradigm Uniformity and Paradigmatic Contrast, couched in the Optimality Theory. But what you write betrays a larger problem than simply failing to read your interlocutor's links; or an inability to properly separate synchrony and diachrony; or lack of knowledge of linguistics. It betrays a “logic first reality later”, “if I don't understand why it's happening, it isn't happening” approach, or on one word, dogma yet again. This is a classic artifact of school prescriptivism, wherein people are trained to resolve a cognitive dissonance by conforming their perception of reality to their (externally acquired) beliefs about how reality should be. In contrast to this, when a scientist sees a complex phenomenon without a satisfactory explanation, they attempt to find one, and they expect it to be complex. Above all, a scientst makes sure they understand the topic before making dismissive, personally-directed comments.
> 
> Therefore I can confidently repeat that whatever you're describing isn't standard Russian and I doubt it's even your own speech – it's so outlandish. There does exist variation in the neuter acc./prep. endings, but I cannot stress enough that anyone asserting that армия and армии, синее and синие don't morphonemically contrast and aren't underlied by two different target pronunciations should be dismissed out of hand as having no grounding in reality.


what I'm used to SPEAKING and  LISTENING  to - the participle is needed here (or is it the gerund? - the form in -ing anyway). I wouldn't mention it, but it has been used twice here and it reads quite badly with the -ing forms.


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## pimlicodude

Eirwyn said:


> You speak of it as if it's some kind of a universal thing across the entire language, while it actually isn't. It clearly doesn't correspond to anything in Russian I'm used to speak and listen to, and it doesn't seem to follow the historical vowel opposition. At first I assumed that you use a system where post-tonic non-front <a>/<o> are analogically reconstructed and distinguished from front <e>/<i> (nom. <polʲo> being opposed to loc. <polʲe> makes a lot of sense morphologically), but what I saw in our previous discussion on this topic was a mishmash of seemingly random associations of the same "e" with different vague entities: "e" that is prototypically "a", "e" that is always "e", "e" that is always "i", "e" that can reduce etc. It could probably exist as a regiolect, but I doubt that such subtle and contextually dependent distinctions could be synchronized across the entire country.


Well, Eirwyn, if you're saying Sobakus and Ahvalj in the other thread both speak a regiolect (a very ugly word; I like idiomatic English only, and so say "regional dialect"), i.e. SPB Russian - then the question arises what regiolect do you speak? 

I think some of this discussion can go over an English learner's head, given that learners don't speak the language well, but:

синий: sʲinʲij
синяя: sʲinʲi(j)æ (going by what Ahvalj wrote)
синее: sʲinʲi(j)ɛ
синие: sʲinʲi(j)i

Are these right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.  Most learners content themselves with, eg. синяя, seen-ya-ya, but of course this is a bad approximation. Although the final vowel is, according to what Ahvalj said, is not fully reduced, I think it may depend on what comes next. синяя тетрадь - the я is followed by a soft consonant, and so can't be very open at all, and probably nearer to ə


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## Rosett

pimlicodude said:


> SPB Russian - then the question arises what regiolect do you speak?


There’s no such thing as SPB Russian. Moreover, we all speak the same Russian here in spite of various inconsistencies.


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## nizzebro

pimlicodude said:


> But on Forvo, поле does sound like it has /e/, whereas в поле sounds like it has /i/, if you listen to the files offered there.


I checked it - many speakers there make the sound clearer in case where поле is the subject or a focused item. In other cases, it depends of whether they hold air pressure constantly, or, drop it, resigning the energy-intensive overtones of /е/. Two almost identical sentences there by the same lady differ a little: вынести навоз на поле (closer to /e/) and вывести (should be вывезти, but...) навоз на поле (closer to /i/).


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## ahvalj

I agree with some of the opinions above…

The modern prepositional case is just Smotrytsky's (?) name of the Slavic locative. The "locative" of the modern Russian grammar is originally the same case with the endings of the _u_-declension
(_домъ_ could have _домѣ_ by the o-declension and _дому_ by the _u_-declension;​in this particular word this is Proto-Indo-European in origin: compare in Latin _domī_ vs. _domū_)​or with a secondarily differing stress
(_о сети_ but _в сети; _by the way I say _о сет__и_).​
The Old Church Slavonic and southern Old East Slavic endings in the singular of the _o_-declension were _*-ai̯>-ѣ/-ě_ after plain consonants (_столѣ/stolě, селѣ/selě_) and _*-ai̯>-*ei̯>-и/-i_ after palatal ones (_кон҄и/koņi, старьци/starьci, житии/žitьji_). Such phonetically arisen pairs existed for some time for many endings, but were mostly eliminated in the later language
(however we still have _село<*sela_ but _поле<*pali̯a;_​when stressed, these endings merged again: _бельё/bʲelʲjo<bělьje<*bēlii̯a_).​The winning ending was (almost?) always the one after plain consonants, hence _конѣ, старцѣ, житьѣ. _The old _-и_ was however in use in Church Slavonic and in words that spread from that stratum, hence _житьѣ, бытьѣ_ vs. _житии, бытии,_ both pairs with a stressed ending. 

The _-ьj-_ before a vowel
(written _-ии-_ in Church Slavonic since it was a "tense yer" then: a higher, _i_-like, version of _ь_ found adjacent to _j_)​became _-ʲj-_ in later Russian (_житьѣ, платьѣ, Васильѣ, Юрьѣ_) and could be pronounced this way in Church Slavonic words as well, hence_ житии>житьи, платии>платьи_. The modern language has reverted to the orthographic pronunciation, so that we have _житье_ but _житии, бытье _but _бытии, платье_ but _происшествии_. In the nineteenth century, however, and even a century ago, this was less regular (Nabokov still declines names of the type _Василий_ as _Василья, Василью, Васильем, Василье_).

Thus, we have a regular Russian _платье_, and a Russified Church Slavonic _платьи._ There is no grammatical distinction in it. Whether people pronounce the same unstressed vowel in both or distinguish _-e_ and _-и_ is regional, personal and depends on the clarity of one's speech
(I distinguish them when speaking carefully and merge in allegro speech;​I also distinguish the ending vowels in _Ваня, Ване_ and _Вани_ under the same conditions).​In the few words of this type where this ending is stressed, the difference is overt: _(о) житье, (о) бытье_ vs. (о) житьи, _(о) бытьи_.

Solzhenitsyn began as a rather standard writer of his time, but started using more and more peculiar words and constructions as his style developed, especially in emigration. Nobody ever spoke as he wrote, even he himself.
In Russia he was alone, but such linguistic changes introduced by prominent writers or journalists played major roles in emerging literary languages in the 19th century, like Hungarian or Estonian, when people invented hundreds of new words and (in Estonian) even endings​(e. g. in Estonian the inherited oblique plurals were formed as _-de-_ + case endings: this was considered too monotonous, so writers introduced, under the Finnish influence, dialectal Estonian forms with a mutated vowel + case endings, so that "in the eggs" is now either the inherited _muna-de-s_ or the implanted _mun-e-s, _cp. Finnish _mun-i-ssa_).​


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## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> what I'm used to SPEAKING and  LISTENING  to - the participle is needed here (or is it the gerund? - the form in -ing anyway). I wouldn't mention it, but it has been used twice here and it reads quite badly with the -ing forms.


Of course, thanks for noting. I wasn't using it, but quoting Eirwyn.


pimlicodude said:


> I think some of this discussion can go over an English learner's head, given that learners don't speak the language well, but:
> 
> синий: sʲinʲij
> синяя: sʲinʲi(j)æ (going by what Ahvalj wrote)
> синее: sʲinʲi(j)ɛ
> синие: sʲinʲi(j)i
> 
> Are these right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.


Yes, these are the articulatory targets before vowel reduction. синяя /sʲinʲi(j)æ/ and синее /sʲinʲi(j)ɛ/ are neutralised in most types of speech. Further reduction involves the collapse of all the bisyllabic endings, and finally might even involve vowel deletion. But in the pronunciation that Ahvalj describes, the maximal degree of reduction nets you a long monophthong.


pimlicodude said:


> Most learners content themselves with, eg. синяя, seen-ya-ya


I surely do hope you're mistaken 


pimlicodude said:


> Although the final vowel is, according to what Ahvalj said, is not fully reduced, I think it may depend on what comes next. синяя тетрадь - the я is followed by a soft consonant, and so can't be very open at all, and probably nearer to ə


The double-soft environment means it has to be a front vowel at any rate, while the degree of openness is inherently linked to duration. Here's a recording.


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## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> Of course, thanks for noting. I wasn't using it, but quoting Eirwyn.
> 
> Yes, these are the articulatory targets before vowel reduction. синяя /sʲinʲi(j)æ/ and синее /sʲinʲi(j)ɛ/ are neutralised in most types of speech. Further reduction involves the collapse of all the bisyllabic endings, and finally might even involve vowel deletion. But in the pronunciation that Ahvalj describes, the maximal degree of reduction nets you a long monophthong.
> 
> I surely do hope you're mistaken
> 
> The double-soft environment means it has to be a front vowel at any rate, while the degree of openness is inherently linked to duration. Here's a recording.



Thank you for the recording. I'm afraid if you've ever met any Anglophone learners of Russian, seen-ya-ya is the "standard learner's pronunciation". There's nothing to be surprised at there. Your pronunciation in the audio file shows clearly the first я is actually и.


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## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> Thank you for the recording. I'm afraid if you've ever met any Anglophone learners of Russian, seen-ya-ya is the "standard learner's pronunciation". There's nothing to be surprised at there. Your pronunciation in the audio file shows clearly the first я is actually и.


Yeah yeah, I know... It's just when someone pronounces the language using barely modified English phonology, you're tempted to deny them the moniker "learner of Russian", or at least qualify it by saying that they're a learner of Russian vocabulary or syntax, but are yet to begin learning its phonology. If somene pronounces seen-ya-ya the way I envisage it, the quality of the first я is the least of their problems 😥 In fact, hardly anybody would dismiss /æjæ/ as wrong.

Speaking of which, I have a nagging feeling that the /i/-pronunciation (what I say last) isn't the one I primarily have in -ая and -ее. It even sounds somewhat childish to me. I think I have /e/, more or less as what I say next-to-last. Of the recordings on Forvo, the ones by cotingino, nasteakov and fulade sound the most natural to me. This also better squares with that ää-like pronunciation that *ahvalj* describes and I can exemplify.


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## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> Yeah yeah, I know... It's just when someone pronounces the language using barely modified English phonology, you're tempted to deny them the moniker "learner of Russian", or at least qualify it by saying that they're a learner of Russian vocabulary or syntax, but are yet to begin learning its phonology. If somene pronounces seen-ya-ya the way I envisage it, the quality of the first я is the least of their problems 😥 In fact, hardly anybody would dismiss /æjæ/ as wrong.
> 
> Speaking of which, I have a nagging feeling that the /i/-pronunciation (what I say last) isn't the one I primarily have in -ая and -ее. It even sounds somewhat childish to me. I think I have /e/, more or less as what I say next-to-last. Of the recordings on Forvo, the ones by cotingino, nasteakov and fulade sound the most natural to me. This also better squares with that ää-like pronunciation that *ahvalj* describes and I can exemplify.


I didn't know you were on Forvo - a native speaker of Latin, no less.


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## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> I didn't know you were on Forvo - a native speaker of Latin, no less.


Don't let anybody tell you otherwise


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## Eirwyn

Sobakus said:


> Do you not see the irony in rudely dismissing somone else's words as “my personal "target pronunciation"”, and going on to make unsubstantiated assertions based on personal anecdotes (“I'm used to speak and listen to”)? I asked for your evidence for a reason.





Sobakus said:


> What you've rudely dismissed as “my personal "target pronunciation"” is actually “the standard pronunciation of Russian” that “holds for most speakers of CSR” according to instrumental studies and standard language manuals. Moreover, it has been noted and discussed on this forum before, including with you as a participant.


Sorry, I didn't mean to hurt your ego that much 

The paper you linked gives both [ˈmorʲə] and [ˈmorʲɪ] as pronunciations of nom./acc. "море", so, at best it's* a* standard pronunciation (assuming that we let this author decide what should be the standard). However, I checked a couple of handbooks and they indeed mentioned this type of pronunciation as well, which is quite interesting and surprising. Until this moment I thought the mainstream point of view was that the final unstressed [ъ] after soft vowels always stands for <а> and corresponds to the orthographic -a/-я while the other three phonemes <о>/<э>/<и> (-е/-е/-и) merge into [ь].

If you wish to see a notarially certified article where the possibility of neutralization of all the four phonemes is mentioned, then the fragment below is the closest I could share with you.



Spoiler











Sobakus said:


> Meanwhile, the double irony is that your assertions here that amount to “армия and армии are morphonemically the same” are incomprehensibly false and their falsity can and has been trivially demonstrated even simply using Forvo, and will shortly be demonstrated further.


So, even these recordings with the final unstressed "e" pronounced identically to its stressed equivalent sound totally normal to you? Does the woman from the following audio speak your "target pronunciation" by any chance?




Sobakus said:


> Bethin's paper recognises that the phenomenon is complex, variable, multilevel, and that previous attempts at reducing it to some simple factor have been unsatisfactory. The author then ventures to explain the phenomenon by using the notions of Paradigm Uniformity and Paradigmatic Contrast, couched in the Optimality Theory. But what you write betrays a larger problem than simply failing to read your interlocutor's links; or an inability to properly separate synchrony and diachrony; or lack of knowledge of linguistics. It betrays a “logic first reality later”, “if I don't understand why it's happening, it isn't happening” approach, or on one word, dogma yet again.


More like "If I can't hear it, it's not a thing for me". Now, after I listened to your recording, it became even more obvious that whatever you're describing cannot be applied to my speech whatsoever.


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## Eirwyn

pimlicodude said:


> a regiolect (a very ugly word; I like idiomatic English only, and so say "regional dialect")


I assume the right word should be "accent". I avoid using it in discussions about Russian since it might be misinterpreted as the Russian word "акцент" which is applied exclusively to foreign accents.



pimlicodude said:


> Well, Eirwyn, if you're saying Sobakus and Ahvalj in the other thread both speak a regiolect (a very ugly word; I like idiomatic English only, and so say "regional dialect"), i.e. SPB Russian - then the question arises what regiolect do you speak?


Saratov. However, I wouldn't say I can hear any significant differences in speech of people living in a roughly 1,000-km radius from us (except for the mixed Russian-Ukrainian areas to the west, of course), so it would make more sense to include into a larger area (Middle Volga?). As for SPB Russian, the situation is quite interesting. For some reason content produced by people from that city does not sound remarkable to me in terms of pronunciation which made me believe they speak exactly like us. At the same time their casual speech does seem to differ in the way similar to how Sobakus describes it. Their post-tonic vowels are longer and articulated more clearly, and at the same time pretonic /a/ is shorter and less open, especially before soft consonants. Because of that, I used to consider people with these speech patterns immigrants from nearby Northern towns, until one of them accidentally mentioned in a conversation that she was born and raised in Saint Petersburg.


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## pimlicodude

Eirwyn said:


> I assume the right word should be "accent". I avoid using it in discussions about Russian since it might be misinterpreted as the Russian word "акцент" which is applied exclusively to foreign accents.
> 
> 
> Saratov. However, I wouldn't say I can hear any significant differences in speech of people living in a roughly 1,000-km radius from us (except for the mixed Russian-Ukrainian areas to the west, of course), so it would make more sense to include into a larger area (Middle Volga?). As for SPB Russian, the situation is quite interesting. For some reason content produced by people from that city does not sound remarkable to me in terms of pronunciation which made me believe they speak exactly like us. At the same time their casual speech does seem to differ in the way similar to how Sobakus describes it. Their post-tonic vowels are longer and articulated more clearly, and at the same time pretonic /a/ is shorter and less open, especially before soft consonants. Because of that, I used to consider people with these speech patterns immigrants from nearby Northern towns, until one of them accidentally mentioned in a conversation that she was born and raised in Saint Petersburg.


Well, St Petersburg is of course a special city in Russia. It is an iconic city, a city that is the most Western-looking, and you could easily argue it should be the capital of Russia. So I wouldn't be surprised if people from SPB felt a special pride vis-a-vis other regions. The current SPB accent, as far as I understand it, has nothing to with the Northern dialects. It's not connected to the (old) dialect of Vologda, for example, which maybe only exists in some villages.


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## ahvalj

pimlicodude said:


> Well, St Petersburg is of course a special city in Russia. It is an iconic city, a city that is the most Western-looking, and you could easily argue it should be the capital of Russia. So I wouldn't be surprised if people from SPB felt a special pride vis-a-vis other regions. The current SPB accent, as far as I understand it, has nothing to with the Northern dialects. It's not connected to the (old) dialect of Vologda, for example, which maybe only exists in some villages.


Saint Petersburg is historically an offshoot of Moscow and was originally populated by Muscovites, who naturally brought their way of speaking. Differences arose with time, but they have been always minor. Overall, the Saint Petersburg pronunciation has long been closer to the orthography and more monotonous, perhaps under the influence of many foreigners in the 18th and 19th centuries, who learned the language as adults (in particular, the old Muscovite speech lengthened pretonic vowels and reduced the remaining ones [which now is perceived as a cartoonish gay accent, _д'раагой_], the merger of unstressed endings being a consequence of this pattern). But I must say we have two Muscovites at the small place where I work, and they speak exactly the same as other people, so I hear no difference implied by the writers of this forum and was originally surprised years ago to read about all those phonetic novelties here.

P. S. From a person seriously interested in architecture. There is indeed this image of the most/only Western-looking city, but in reality things are much more prosaic. Like in other northern countries, Russian cities have historically been wooden, and they inevitably burnt several times a century. Outside Saint Petersburg, stone buildings started to appear in serious amounts in the second half of the 18th century. Since, except Moscow, other cities were small, semi-rural, and most inhabitants could not afford sufficient investments, these buildings were (in the majority of cases) of low artistic and technical quality. When, however, towards the end of the 19th century, the province became more prosperous, new construction became quite decent. Larger southern cities like Odessa, Kiev, Kharkov (currently in Ukraine, but all were Russian-speaking), Rostov-on-Don received a number of pretty good façades at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (many were destroyed during the WWII unfortunately), middle-sized cities like Nizhniy Novgorod, Samara, Irkutsk, Vladivostok have some decent façades as well. All are built in more or less the same manner as in Saint Petersburg and are no less "Western" (which in Russia means Italian and Austro-Hungarian influences).


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## pimlicodude

ahvalj said:


> Saint Petersburg is historically an offshoot of Moscow and was originally populated by Muscovites, who naturally brought their way of speaking. Differences arose with time, but they have been always minor. Overall, the Saint Petersburg pronunciation has long been closer to the orthography and more monotonous, perhaps under the influence of many foreigners in the 18th and 19th centuries, who learned the language as adults (in particular, the old Muscovite speech lengthened pretonic vowels and reduced the remaining ones [which now is perceived as a cartoonish gay accent, _д'раагой_], the merger of unstressed endings being a consequence of this pattern). But I must say we have two Muscovites at the small place where I work, and they speak exactly the same as other people, so I hear no difference implied by the writers of this forum and was originally surprised years ago to read about all those phonetic novelties here.
> 
> P. S. From a person seriously interested in architecture. There is indeed this image of the most/only Western-looking city, but in reality things are much more prosaic. Like in other northern countries, Russian cities have historically been wooden, and they inevitably burnt several times a century. Outside Saint Petersburg, stone buildings started to appear in serious amounts in the second half of the 18th century. Since, except Moscow, other cities were small, semi-rural, and most inhabitants could not afford sufficient investments, these buildings were (in the majority of cases) of low artistic and technical quality. When, however, towards the end of the 19th century, the province became more prosperous, new construction became quite decent. Larger southern cities like Odessa, Kiev, Kharkov (currently in Ukraine, but all were Russian-speaking), Rostov-on-Don received a number of pretty good façades at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (many were destroyed during the WWII unfortunately), middle-sized cities like Nizhniy Novgorod, Samara, Irkutsk, Vladivostok have some decent façades as well. All are built in more or less the same manner as in Saint Petersburg and are no less "Western" (which in Russia means Italian and Austro-Hungarian influences).


Yes, but you relate Westernness to architecture only. In Western press accounts, SPB is politically more Western. Some argue VVP has long been pro-Western, although getting nowhere over the decades with his attempts to see Russia accepted in the West, and he’s from Piter. I’m not sure Western commentators actually know anything...

Western-looking: I meant "it looks to the West", not "выглядит западным" (having a Western appearance).


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## nizzebro

pimlicodude said:


> In Western press accounts, SPB is politically more Western.


Their own interpretation, if not propaganda. The matter is that this city is just, you know... substantive in any sense, but I'm struggling to formulate this rationally.  Let's say - it is a place of power in Russia. Historically, it is also related to imperial power and Western vector, but, this is only a secondary view. In computer games, there is such a meme as Black Monolith. St-Pete is like that,  I'd say, only of silver color, as if made of mercury...
As for politics, they should provide an example of "more Eastern" or "less of all Western" city then - or that just makes no any sense (what could it mean? isolationism? attraction to Islam? no idea).


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## ahvalj

pimlicodude said:


> Yes, but you relate Westernness to architecture only. In Western press accounts, SPB is politically more Western. Some argue VVP has long been pro-Western, although getting nowhere over the decades with his attempts to see Russia accepted in the West, and he’s from Piter. I’m not sure Western commentators actually know anything...
> 
> Western-looking: I meant "it looks to the West", not "выглядит западным" (having a Western appearance).



[I honestly don't notice any political attitude here at all. If anything, it is modern Yekaterinburg that (for unknown reasons) shows pro-Western orientation recently. Saint Petersburg is rather sleepy and self-sufficient. Plus, anyway, what most people like is old, cosy and efficient, Western Europe, which has been rapidly disappearing in the last decades. Just look at the Russian (and not only) comments on YouTube under any French movie of the 1970's.

I'd say if Americans were a little more flexible and allowed some autonomy for the local rulers, they would have had a loyal regime here for decades, certainly a more loyal one that in Latin America or Gulf monarchies. This didn't happen and a Rubicon has been crossed this February, perhaps fortunately for Russia's future as this opens some (vague) perspectives of development…]


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## pimlicodude

ahvalj said:


> [I honestly don't notice any political attitude here at all. If anything, it is modern Yekaterinburg that (for unknown reasons) shows pro-Western orientation recently. Saint Petersburg is rather sleepy and self-sufficient. Plus, anyway, what most people like is old, cosy and efficient, Western Europe, which has been rapidly disappearing in the last decades. Just look at the Russian (and not only) comments on YouTube under any French movie of the 1970's.
> 
> I'd say if Americans were a little more flexible and allowed some autonomy for the local rulers, they would have had a loyal regime here for decades, certainly a more loyal one that in Latin America or Gulf monarchies. This didn't happen and a Rubicon has been crossed this February, perhaps fortunately for Russia's future as this opens some (vague) perspectives of development…]


Nizzebro and Ahvalj, you are right in all respects!


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