# Ukrainian: и (pronunciation)



## mateo19

Split from here.

Hello Anatoli!

I was wondering, is the Ukrainian и really /ɨ/ ?  I didn't know that the Ukrainian и equals the Russian ы.  This would explain why I'm having trouble pronouncing it.  It is a difficult vowel for English speakers.  I had previously looked at a vowel chart for Ukrainian, on Wikipedia, and it said the и was /ɪ/ .  Is it somewhere in the middle or does it change its quality depending on the environment?

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


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## Maroseika

Roughly (Ukr/Rus): 
 и / ы
 i / и


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## andrewsiak

Maroseika said:


> Roughly (Ukr/Rus):
> и / ы
> i / и


 
I'd say, the Ukrainian и is closer to French é than to Russian ы


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## mateo19

Hello,

Well, I'm still not sure that I'm very convinced.  I think that there are some deeper linguistic happenings here.  Maybe /ɨ/ is an allophone of /ɪ/ in Ukrainian?  That is to say, и is pronounced as /ɪ/ in certain phonetic environments and as /ɨ/ in others.  If this is the case, I wouldn't know what the environments are. 

The thing that disappoints me is that the resources available for Ukrainian are simply incomplete or unreliable.  Why would both of my Ukrainian books say the и = /ɪ/ (as in "bit") if it clearly does not in many instances?  When I listen to Ukrainian music, I definitely recognize that many times, the и is not /ɪ/.  This is clear to me.  But the correct pronunciation and description of it still escape me.  So робити is /robɨtɨ/, eh?


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## andrewsiak

робити is definitely NOT /robɨtɨ/, but /robɪtɪ/
The songs you've listened to might have been sung by Ukrainian Russophones, who tend to pronounce the Ukrainian /ɪ/ as the Russian /ɨ/. And let it not deceive you.

It is true that this sound varies greatly from East of Ukraine to West, roughly from /ɪ/ to /e/, but it never ever should be pronounced as /ɨ/.


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## mateo19

Цікаво.  Дякую за відповідь!  А ви, де ви живете в Україні?

Well, my ear is still untrained.  Does anyone know where Океан Ельзи is from (Wikipedia says they are from Львів, a large and important city in Western Ukraine)?  I probably misheard it though!  When I was listening to some of their songs, I just noticed that the и did not sound like an English /ɪ/.


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## andrewsiak

Я живу в Києві, та й сам з Києва.

Okena Elzy is indeed from Lviv, and they do sing with a Lviv accent, their и sounding more like Polish y.


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## Ptak

andrewsiak said:


> I'd say, the Ukrainian и is closer to French é than to Russian ы


I have a Ukrainian textbook printed in Lviv, 1999, and it's said there that the Ukrainian *и* should be pronounced like the Russian *ы* (which is Polish *y*, roughly).
I never knew that it sounds different in Kiev.  Well, I never heard the Ukrainian *и* sounding like the French *é*. And I may be wrong, but I suppose the *é* could sound different in French.


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## andrewsiak

Ptak said:


> I have an Ukrainian textbook printed in Lviv, 1999, and it's said there that the Ukrainian *и* should be pronounced like the Russian *ы* (which is Polish *y*, roughly).


 
This is wrong, as all three sounds (Russian, Ukrainian and Polish) are different. It may be right only ROUGHLY as you put it. Just like the Russian O is ROUGHLY equal to the English O.




Ptak said:


> And I may be wrong, but I suppose the *é* could sound different in French.


 
The French *é *is indeed close to the Ukrainian *и*.


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## Ptak

andrewsiak said:


> The French *é*


In which word, for example?


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## Ptak

andrewsiak said:
			
		

> I have an Ukrainian textbook printed in Lviv, 1999, and it's said there that the Ukrainian *и* should be pronounced like the Russian *ы* (which is Polish *y*, roughly).
> 
> 
> 
> This is wrong
Click to expand...

Do you think it were not Ukrainians who wrote that textbook, in _Lviv_, in the _1999_ year?


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## andrewsiak

Ptak said:


> Do you think it were not Ukrainians who wrote that textbook, in _Lviv_, in the _1999_ year?


 
I don't know who they were, but they obviously did it descriptively without going into details in order to make it easier for Poles/Russians to learn Ukrainian. I suppose their idea was, it is better when a person speaks Ukrainian somehow rather then a person knows how to pronounce correctly but does not speak at all.


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## Ptak

So, andrewsiak, you can't answer my question about the French *é*, right?


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## andrewsiak

Ptak said:


> So, andrewsiak, you can't answer my question about the French *é*, right?


The French *é* sounds exactly the same in all words where you can find it.


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## Ptak

Well, it sounds to me almost like the Russian '*э*'.


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## andrewsiak

Ptak said:


> Well, it sounds to me almost like the Russian '*э*'.


 
well, then you don't know French well enough. There is a clear difference in minimal pairs such as "crée" and "craie"


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## Natabka

Ptak said:


> I have a Ukrainian textbook printed in Lviv, 1999, and it's said there that the Ukrainian *и* should be pronounced like the Russian *ы* (which is Polish *y*, roughly).



Well, it's quite a complicated thing to explain without being able to show the pronunciation on the audio files. But there are a few things that should be clarified:

Ukrainian [и] in stressed positions (as well as in some unstressed) is pronounced clearly and distinctly but at the same time without _any_ straining on the part of the vocal cords. In the majority of unstressed positions, in the stem of a word before stressed syllables with [a],[o] [и] is pronounced closer to [e] (like in дир*е*ктор, вишн*е*вий - I marked stressed vowels).

Though, in different regions of Ukraine it sounds different (which is a deviation from the Standard, but, I think, is not a mistake, as we all speak with some accent):

In some of the *Western regions* it is closer to Ukrainian [*е*] (in ALL positions) (probably, it's the way Vakarchuk sings . Though, I've listened to some of his songs for this purpose - "Ти собі сама" is a bad example of [и], but "Вставай, мила моя" sounds correct to my ear.)

The [и] pronunciation in the *Carpathians *sounds closer to Russian strained [*ы*], whereas in *Northern regions* it is narrowed and closer to Ukrainian/English [*i*].
_(According to "Українська літературна вимова" by Pohribnyi, 1992)
_
So, Matthew, if you want to sound perfect, you shouldn't listen to any of us but to the specially trained teachers, who teach Standard pronunciation 

What I would like to single out is that pronouncing of [и] as [і] or [ы] is incorrect, though similarity to [e] in some positions is possible.

P.S. Anyway, Океан Ельзи is far from perfect when it comes to pronunciation, because Vakarchuk mispronounces also [o], burrs.


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## Ptak

andrewsiak said:


> well, then you don't know French well enough. There is a clear difference in minimal pairs such as "crée" and "craie"


I hear that difference quite well, but I mean that the both sounds seem much closer to the Russian *э* and are not close at all to the Russian *ы* from my point of view.


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## andrewsiak

Ptak said:


> I hear that difference quite well, but I mean that the both sounds seem much closer to the Russian *э* and are not close at all to the Russian *ы* from my point of view.


 
This is right, the Russian *ы* is nothing to do with the French *é* nor with the Ukrainian *и*.


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## Ptak

Well, maybe Ukrainian which I've heard sometimes was "non-Ukrainian" Ukrainian, or maybe spoken by Russian-speaking Ukrainians, but, for instance, the Ukrainian word "*ви*" sounds to me _exactly_ like the Russian "*вы*".


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## Natabka

Ptak said:


> Well, maybe Ukrainian which I've heard sometimes was "non-Ukrainian" Ukrainian, or maybe spoken by Russian-speaking Ukrainians, but, for instance, the Ukrainian word "*ви*" sounds to me _exactly_ like the Russian "*вы*".



Yeap, all is possible when it comes to the acoustic high brow stuff


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## vince

Is there a phonetic IPA symbol to represent the Ukrainian *и?*

Would the hypothetical word "с_и__" _sound like English? "see", "say", or a Russian с*ы*?

How about "se" in European Portuguese?


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## Duya

Normal transcription seems to be /ɪ/, i.e. near-close near-front unrounded. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_phonology
http://www.vesna.org.ua/txt/biloust/UkrIPA.pdf

Ostensibly, it's the same as English /ɪ/ in b*ui*ld. Note, however, that it's the broad, phonemic transcription. That means that Ukrainian /ɪ/ is not necessarily identical to English  /ɪ/, only that it's the one that most closely resembles an "average" or "cardinal" sound _in the context of Ukrainian._

The "referent" method of denoting a vowel is a vowel chart, and positions of every vowel are [slightly] different for every language.

P.S. Thus, Ukrainian "с_и__"_ should be close to English "s*i*t". Russian *ы *is further back, i.e. /ɨ/.


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## Ukrainito

The difference between the two Ukrainian sounds represented, respectively, by the letters *и* and *і* - in literary, unSURZHIKsized Ukrainian - is pretty much the same as that between the English sounds /ɪ/ and /i/. The Ukrainian *и* is most commonly transcribed as /y/, though. 

For years, I have been teaching both Ukrainian and English (American English) here in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (Ukraine's most un-Ukrainian and pro-Russian peninsular territory with a predominantly Russian-speaking population), and that's exactly how I explain the difference between the vowel sounds in pairs like *lick-leak, bit-beat*. My point is that the vowels in the Ukrainian *дим/дім* are practically identical with the English *dim/deem*. At least in General American English.

At the same time, the best sort of explanation that local Russian-speaking teachers of English can come up with in their pronunciation drills is something like, “just make the /i/ in *leak* twice as long as that same /i/ in *lick*”.


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## andrewsiak

Ukrainito said:


> My point is that the vowels in the Ukrainian *дим/дім* are practically identical with the English *dim/deem*. At least in General American English.


 
Comparison of these two pairs seems quite right to me


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## Alvitr

Ukrainito said:


> The Ukrainian *и* is most commonly transcribed as /y/, though.



Sorry to bring this up again, but I am still a little confused what would be the right letter to use where. How to write a name correctly for example, where we often use the same Latin letter, but there is still a difference in how to pronounce it.
For example: Nikola and Lina.  Or Nikolina.
All spelled with "i" but in the first example "Nikola" - the "i" is a lot shorter, even though it is followed by a single consonant) and sound more like somewhere between an "*i*" and an "*y*" to me. 
And in the 3rd example "Nikolina", where I have two "i's"  sounding slightly different from each other.
How would be the correct way to write this, in Ukrainian, to point out the difference in sound between the two, if you do it with names?


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