# Time when Russian had no soft consonants



## C.S.Hy

Was there a time when Russian had no SOFT [edited, originally hard. No more connotation to similar edits below] consonants? 

(If you known the answer and do not want to elaborate on it, just say yes or no, I'll appreciate it all the same).

Was there a time when Russian, or its predecessors, had no soft consonants?

Hard, or palatalized, consonants are (or rather the phonological opposition between hard and soft consonants is) regarded as a feature of Russian (or slavic languages？）.

But some fragmentary clues seem to be suggesting that there might be a time when Russian, or its predecessors, had no systematic soft consonants: the letter Ь had reputedly had its own sound in history and today in certain circumstances it still produces an extra sound /ɪ/, for example, when coming before an iotated vowel.

Hence it occurs to me that the soft consonants might have derived from their corresponding hard ones under particular conditions.

Is it true or false? Maybe this is a basic and known-to-all matter for students of historical Russian phonetics, but not for me, an utterly beginner of Russian.

What I can think of are: are there other evidences that prove, or disprove (in terms of the literature known so far), the hypothesis? Is there any modern slavic language that has no the opposition between hard and soft consonants? Had it ever had it?

To know yes or no about this question is unlikely to help a lot in Russian learning, but it is still tickling me.


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## Awwal12

C.S.Hy said:


> Was there a Time when Russian, or its predecessors, had no hard consonants?
> Hard, or palatalized, consonants are regarded as a feature of Russian (or slavic languages？）.


You mean soft, I suppose. Most hard consonants are inherited from the Proto-Slavic state and are mostly intact in Russian (which preserves their original velarization; the labialization is lost, but some scholars claim it never was there in the first place).

There is still no full consensus about the history of soft (palatalized/palatal) consonants. The old mainstream theory is that Proto-Slavic had a set of soft consonants, which increased over time as the historical palatalizations occured ("ш", "ж" and "ц" are all etymologically soft); in Old Russian around the XI century ALL consonant before front vowels became soft (and Ukrainian has subsequently lost the results due to de-palalatalization); then the fall of the yers turned these soft sounds into actual soft phonemes. Some of the Old Russian soft consonants became hard later, by whole phonemes (e.g. /ш/) or in certain positions (e.g. "ем" < Old Rus. "ѣмь"). In turn, Old Russian velars became soft before /и/ (< /*ы/) in Russian, thus turning Old Russian "кы", "гы", "хы" into formerly impossible "ки", "ги", "хи".

All in all, soft consonants are a common Slavic feature, even if some modern Slavic languages have lost the opposition between soft and hard consonants entirely (like Slovene), while some spreaded it to almost all kind of consonants (like Russian did).


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## C.S.Hy

Thank you very much, AW!


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## Nikined

Awwal12 said:


> All in all, soft consonants are a common Slavic feature, even if some modern Slavic languages have lost the opposition between soft and hard consonants entirely (like Slovene), while some spreaded it to almost all kind of consonants (like Russian did).


Вы о произношении? В словенском есть же несколько пар твердых и мягких букв


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## Awwal12

Nikined said:


> Вы о произношении? В словенском есть же несколько пар твердых и мягких букв


Откуда там пары букв?.. Вы со словацким ничего не перепутали?   В словенском нет ни одной пары фонем, которые отличались бы только мягкостью.


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## Nikined

Awwal12 said:


> Откуда там пары букв?.. Вы со словацким ничего не перепутали?   В словенском нет ни одной пары фонем, которые отличались бы только мягкостью.


l и lj, n и nj, Ć (на концах фамилий) и Č


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## Assiduous student

Nikined said:


> l и lj, n и nj, Ć (на концах фамилий) и Č



Мало что знаю об этом, но вы уверены в том что есть мягкие л и н в словенском? /lj/ и /nj/ не мякие согласные, а л+й, н+й. Если они мягкие, возможно говорить что у нас в английском тоже есть (в million и onion).


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## Nikined

Assiduous student said:


> Мало что знаю об этом, но вы уверены в том что есть мягкие л и н в словенском? /lj/ и /nj/ не мякие согласные, а л+й, н+й. Если они мягкие, возможно говорить что у нас в английском тоже есть (в million и onion).


Да. В югославских языках lj и nj - это именно мягкие согласные, в кириллическом алфавите есть буквы љ и _њ_, которые за неимением подходящих букв перевели на латинский как lj и nj.


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## Awwal12

Nikined said:


> l и lj, n и nj, Ć (на концах фамилий) и Č


Unlike in BSC, "lj" and "nj" in Slovene represent simply /lj/ and /nj/ combinations. "Ć" is an orthographic loan from BCS which doesn't represent a separate phoneme either and apparently exists only in BCS surnames (cf. "Vida Tomšič").



Nikined said:


> Да. В югославских языках lj и nj - это именно мягкие согласные, в кириллическом алфавите есть буквы љ и _њ_, которые за неимением подходящих букв перевели на латинский как lj и nj.


Не существует "югославских языков" как лингвистического таксона. Если боснийский, сербский и хорватский представляют собой в сущности один полицентричный язык, то македонский и словенский тут никаким боком, и если они имеют алфавиты, приближенные к сербохорватской латинице и кириллице соответственно (что понятно с учётом исторических реалий), из этого никак не следует, что они будут читаться так же. Это всё равно что читать чувашский или татарский кириллический текст по правилам русского, апеллируя к "российским языкам".


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## Nikined

Awwal12 said:


> Unlike in BSC, "lj" and "nj" in Slovene represent simply /lj/ and /nj/ combinations. "Ć" is an orthographic loan from BCS which doesn't represent a separate phoneme either and apparently exists only in BCS surnames (cf. "Vida Tomšič").


Получается, столица страны, которая везде, где я смотрел, пишется и произносится как "любляна",  тоже "не того" происхождения?


Awwal12 said:


> Не существует "югославских языков" как лингвистического таксона. Если боснийский, сербский и хорватский представляют собой в сущности один полицентричный язык, то македонский и словенский тут никаким боком, и если они имеют алфавиты, приближенные к сербохорватской латинице и кириллице соответственно (что понятно с учётом исторических реалий), из этого никак не следует, что они будут читаться так же. Это всё равно что читать чувашский или татарский кириллический текст по правилам русского, апеллируя к "российским языкам".


Ну с чувашским это совсем загнули. Словенский к одной группе и "подгруппе" принадлежит хотя бы, а не является полностью чуждым языком.


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## Panceltic

"Любляна" на литературном словенском  произносится "Лъюблъяна". В разговорном языке мы говорим "Лублана" - это касается и других слов, как например pole (polje), popustliv (popustljiv), pluvati (pljuvati) ...

(На сербском имя города пишется "Љубљана", и произношение как на русском.)


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## ahvalj

The modern Russian soft consonants go back to two earlier kinds of consonants: palatal and palatalized. Palatal consonants (phonetically, those with a stronger palatal articulation, like the Serbo-Croatian _nj_ and _lj_) arose in all Slavic languages as a result of iotation (that is, the change of consonant + yod) or from velars in vicinity of front vowels. Palatalized consonants (phonetically, those with lighter palatal articulation) arose in most Slavic languages before front vowels. In Slovene and Serbo-Croatian, there seem to be no detectable traces of this second type: for example the Russian _конь_ (with the former palatal _n,_ from _*nj_) and _день_ (from the former palatalized _n,_ with _n_ softened before the short _*i>ь_) correspond to коњ but дан.

In East Slavic, in the last centuries of the first millennium there was a change _*el>olo_ and _*il>ъl_ in the closed syllables (e. g. _*telktī>толочи>толочь_ and _*tilkān>тълкѹ>толку_), before which the consonants remained hard. Several centuries later, when a change _e>o_ took place in several positions, consonants had already been palatalized, compare for example the Ukrainian льон and дьоготь. That suggests that palatalized consonants arose sometime in the end of the first millennium. Palatal consonants had arisen earlier, and the opposition _n : ņ, r : ŗ _and _l : ļ _(as in _она : коня, ору: порю, стола : поля_) is common Slavic, that is it precedes the formation of a separate Russian language, and in general of East Slavic languages.

[Corrected the link to _дьоготь_]


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## Awwal12

The idea of opposition between palatal and palatalized consonants is the most problematic part here. As far as I know, such opposition is typologically doubtful (is there any language where it's actually attested?). The supposition that hard consonants before front vowels were simply losing their hardness (i.e. their (labio)velarization) looks sufficient.

(Btw, дьоготь may be a loanword from northern dialects; this position is really atypical for labialization in Ukrainian - cf. легкий.)


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## ahvalj

Palatal consonants exist in Slovene and Serbo-Croatian (and partly secondarily in West Slavic), and are directly attested in the Old Church Slavonic orthography, as _н҄, л҄_ and _р҄._


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> Palatal consonants exist in Slovene and Serbo-Croatian (and partly secondarily in West Slavic), and are directly attested in the Old Church Slavonic orthography, as _н҄, л҄_ and _р҄._


The trouble is not in the palatal consonants, it's in the suggested contrast between, say, [ɲ] and [nʲ] (I hope I get you right?).


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## ahvalj

A millennium ago Bulgarian scribes distinguished in writing the consonants in _кон҇ь тъ_ and _дьнь тъ;_ in modern Bulgarian these both merged into _nʲ_ in _конят_ and _денят_. We can't tell how strongly palatalized was _n_ in _дьнь тъ,_ but it seems reasonable to suppose that at some (probably short) period (in Old Church Slavonic itself or somewhat later) it was already somewhat palatalized, but less so than the fully palatal _н҇_.

I intentionally don't use the concept of phoneme since it is not that useful in etymology, where positional evolutionary changes often outnumber phonemic ones. If you prefer to speak in these terms, however, then I would say that shortly before the fall of the yers the palatal _ɲ_ was opposed to _n,_ which was (at least outside south-west Slavic) positionally palatalized before front vowels. For the topic question it is important that the Russian soft consonants go back to these two separate types and that one is older than the other, so while palatalized consonants emerged in the course of the history of East Slavic (so that there _was_ time when the Slavic dialects spoken in these lands had no positionally palatalized consonants), the originally palatal ones had already existed when several separate Slavic tribes came here (so that there _was not_ a time when Slavic spoken here had no phonemically palatal consonants).


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## ahvalj

That _*rj_ and _*lj_ disappeared earlier can be seen from that their _r_ and _l_ don't participate in pleophony, so we have _*marja>мор҇е>море_ (not _**морое_) but *marwijas>_моровии>муравей_. Thus, when _*el>olo_ prior to development of positional palatalization of the preceding consonant (#12), _*rj _and _*lj_ did not already exist as consonant clusters: they were palatal phonemes.

P. S. Interestingly, while independently, the relationship between the Serbo-Croatian palatal _lj_ and _nj_ and the Russian palatalized _Cʲ_ is replicated, with even almost the same actual pronunciation (before back vowels at least), in the Latvian _ļ_ and _ņ_ vs. the Lithuanian _Cʲ_. In modern standard Latvian (except Latgalian, be it regarded as a dialect or a separate language), only _ļ _and_ ņ_ (and _ģ, ķ_) exist, having developed from _*lj _and _*nj_ and pronounced as palatals (_ŗ_ has hardened in the first half of the 20th century), whereas in standard Lithuanian every consonant (except _j_) now exists as a pair of velarized _C_ and palatalized _Cʲ_ (with even the same fronting effects on the following vowels as in Russian), palatalized consonants having developed from both iotated ones and those positionally palatalized before front vowels. Consider for example vaļa : valia, krāšņu : _krosnių_ [sʲnʲ], in the latter case the plain _n_ in _krāsni_ vs. the positionally automatically palatalized _nʲ_ in _krosnį_.

The Ukrainian instances of _e>o_ after non-palatals (that is, not _й, ч, дж, ш, щ, ж_) are all atypical (so both in _льон_ and _дьоготь_), I just wanted to illustrate that the change took place in an otherwise depalatalizing context.


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## Zec

Some data from various Kajkavian dialects may be of use. Kajkavian, like Slovene, tends to depalatalize _nj_ [ɲ]and _lj_ [ʎ] although they never decouple into [nj] and [lj] like in Standard Slovene. It also has, atypically for South Slavic, positional palatalization of consonants before front vowels, at least positional palatalization of _n_ and _l_. This can lead to a merger of _n_ and _l_ with _nj_ and _lj_ before front vowels.

In my village's dialect, _lj_ is [lʲ], only occasionally fully depalatalizing to a clear [l]. There is palatalization of _l_ before all front vowels, leading to its merger with _lj_. Before other vowels _l_ is a dark [ɫ] and well distinguished from _lj_. The consonant _nj_ is however a fully palatal [ɲ]. The consonant _n_ is only palatalized before _i_, and the resulting [nʲ] doesn't regularly merge with _nj_ [ɲ], only in a handful of words. In a neighboring village's dialect, however, _n_ merges with _nj_ before _i_ as [ɲ] regularly.

So there is an actual case where [nʲ] is distinguished from [ɲ], but it's apparent this is not a stable situation.


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## ahvalj

So, western South Slavic may have positional palatalization after all ,)

That may explain the cases like _gnjiti_ in the standard language.

The question is how old this positional palatalization of only _n_ and _l _is: from what I know about how such things occur, they almost always affect all the available consonants (Irish, Slavic, Baltic, Mordvinic, instances in Turkic), so perhaps the presence of _lj_ and _nj_ is somehow canalizing the ability of speakers to produce palatalization in only these two consonants. I wonder if the palatal _rj_ survives anywhere dialectally in Slovene and Serbo-Croatian and if a similar positional palatalization is observed for _r_ in this case.


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## rushalaim

Obviously, linguists are denying Russian language to have more soft sounds (though the Russian language has them) but other languages artificially multiply sounds, for example, metel' (метель, it must be мьетьель) not any "мэтэль", or wesenny (весенний, it must be вьесьенньий) not any "вэсэнный" and more. Russian language has many soft and hard sounds than linguists permitted to have today.


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## Awwal12

rushalaim said:


> Obviously, linguists are denying Russian language to have more soft sounds (though the Russian language has them) but other languages artificially multiply sounds, for example, metel' (метель, it must be мьетьель) not any "мэтэль", or wesenny (весенний, it must be вьесьенньий) not any "вэсэнный" and more. Russian language has many soft and hard sounds than linguists permitted to have today.


I don't understand you, I am afraid.


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## ahvalj

Awwal12 said:


> I don't understand you, I am afraid.


That's a typical outcome of the oddities of the Russian orthography that combines in one letter palatalization/yod and the subsequent vowel. The vast majority of Russian speakers have not a slightest idea that _е, ю, я_ and _ё_ (1) do not denote separate vowels and (2) denote different things postconsonantally and elsewhere. That's the source of those _Ekaterinas, Dostoevskys_ and countless other horrors, not to mention than no transcription marks positional palatalization before _e_.

By the way, I once thought this was a local corruption of the Old Church Slavonic system with _ѥ, ѩ_ etc., but no: it has turned out East Slavs wrote this way since the very beginning.


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## Panceltic

ahvalj said:


> I wonder if the palatal _rj_ survives anywhere dialectally in Slovene



Not that I'm aware of. All three palatals (_rj_, _lj_, and _nj_) completely depalatalised in coda position and in front of consonants, and decomposed to _r+_j, _l+j_ and _n+j_ elsewhere. It is just a quirk of the orthography that lj and nj are still written like this in all positions, whereas we have rj only before vowels.

Compare: *kralj* [kral] > *kralja* [kralja], *Kranj* [kran] > *Kranja* [Kranja], *car* [tsar] > *carja* [tsarja].

Dialectally, [lj] is completely depalatalised to [l] in a big part of the country. The realisation of [nj] usually varies between [n], [jn] and even a sort of nasalised [j] in some places. [rj] remains as is everywhere, or even becoming just [r] in areas close to Croatia.


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## Zec

ahvalj said:


> So, western South Slavic may have positional palatalization after all ,)
> 
> That may explain the cases like _gnjiti_ in the standard language.
> 
> The question is how old this positional palatalization of only _n_ and _l _is: from what I know about how such things occur, they almost always affect all the available consonants (Irish, Slavic, Baltic, Mordvinic, instances in Turkic), so perhaps the presence of _lj_ and _nj_ is somehow canalizing the ability of speakers to produce palatalization in only these two consonants. I wonder if the palatal _rj_ survives anywhere dialectally in Slovene and Serbo-Croatian and if a similar positional palatalization is observed for _r_ in this case.



Re: the palatalization in _gnjiti_ happens specifically in the cluster _gn_, a similar palatalization happens to the cluster _kn_ as in _knjiga_. It does happen only before front vowels and might be old. I've seen it dated to the time of the 2nd palatalization. Supposedly _k_ and _g_ would be palatalized across _n_ like they were across _v_ in clusters _kv_ and _gv_, but here the palatalization would be transmitted to _n_ while _k_ and _g_ would eventually depalatalize. It doesn't make much sense to me. I'd rather compare it (typologically, I'm wary of assuming any direct influence in this particular case) to palatalizations of _cl_, _gl_ and _gn_ in Romance.

As for positional palatalization in Kajkavian, one source mentions palatalization of _t_ and _d_. It doesn't seem to exist in my dialect, and I'm not sure I've ever heard it elsewhere. In any case the Kajkavian palatalization is younger than the general Slavic one, it definitely postdates the merger of *y and *i and *ъ and *ь, since it happens before all of them indiscriminately.


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## ahvalj

_Knjiga_ is a particular case as it is eventually an oriental loan: in Old Church Slavonic its older form looks like _кън҄игы/kъņigy _(nominative/accusative plural), thus with a borrowed _ņ_ and a yer between _k_ and _ņ_.

I have a manual of Ukrainian published a century ago by a west Ukrainian author, and it distinguishes between two kinds of _i_: the palatalizing one (written _ї_) coming from _ě_ and from _e_ lengthened before a disappearing yer (via _ie_), and a non-palatalizing _i_ (written _і_) coming from _o_ lengthened before a disappearing yer (via _uo>üö>ü>i_, intermediate stages alive dialectally), e. g.  _дҍло>дїло_ vs. _домъ>дім _(in its contemporary east Ukrainian and in Soviet standard Ukrainian the non-palatalizing _i_ was abandoned and all paired consonants were automatically palatalized before any _i_). Thus, there is a core where palatalization is inherited and a body of additional cases where it appeared later by analogy. In principle, the instances of Kajkavian palatalization before _y_ and _ъ_ might have followed a similar path — of course if the palatalization before old front vowels is ancient there.

The peculiarity of Slovene and Serbo-Croatian is that it seems to be impossible to tell whether they possessed positional palatalization a millennium ago. Most Slavic languages have abandoned most instances of positional palatalization, but there are occasional traces left of the former state of affairs. For example, Czech has _ř_ whenever Russian has _рь,_ both from _*ŗ_ (bouře, pekař) and from _*rʲ_ (řád, říct, řeka, tři, tvář), which has escaped general Czech depalatalization because of the prior assibilation of _rʲ/ŗ_.

And I should correct my statement in #14 that Slovene has palatal consonants: I thought _lj_ and _nj_ retained their palatal character before vowels in the official style.


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## rushalaim

Awwal12 said:


> I don't understand you, I am afraid.


For example, the word "есть" has initial hard е-sound* "JEсть*", but why the same letter is for the soft e-sound in "тебя"? There are two different letters for soft and hard и-sound: и and й. Or hard initial я-sound and soft я-sound have just common я-letter, but the word "тебя" would be more correct to write "теб*ää". *Why scientists gave Finnish alphabeth letters for every Finnish sound but still denying Russian sounds have correct letters?


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## Awwal12

rushalaim said:


> For example, the word "есть" has initial hard е-sound* "JEсть*"


You use some unfamiliar terminology. "Hard" and "soft" are used in Slavistics in relation to consonant quality ("soft" = "palatalized or palatal"; "hard" = "non-palatalized; often velarized instead"). E.g. the hard [s] in "сэр" /ser/ or "вас" /vas/ vs. the soft [sʲ] in "сер" /s'er/ or "Вась" /vas'/.


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