# Хлеб (last consonant voicelessing)



## Quernon

Hey, I'm a little confused because I learned that final voiced consonants became unvoiced at the end of words but when I watch Youtube videos about pronunciation the native speakers clearly don't do that. Or is it just because they pronounce the words slowly with exaggerated pronunciation for learners and they keep those end consonants voiced so as not to confuse beginners?

I clearly hear хле*б* when I should hear "хле*п*"


Also, about До свидания I learned that _voiceless consonants sound voiced when they are followed by voiced consonants.

*(...)*_


----------



## Maroseika

Last voiced consonant is always unvoiced. Probably you are right that it is heard voiced in those videosbecause natives pronounce words with exaggerated pronunciation.

As for the voiceless consonants followed by voiced consonants, this rule is not universal. In particluar, consonants are not voiced before в: свидание, творить, квартира, капвложения, швея.


----------



## Quernon

Thanks, I'll now stop doubting when I here voiced final consonants in certain words on pronunciation videos.

And ok C isn't voiced before B. That's an exception that's never been mentioned in any of the Russian methods I've read. Good to learn it from a native.


----------



## Sobakus

/В/, originally being a sonorant (and still not exactly a fricative), is transparent to voicing/devoicing like other sonorants (Р/Л/Н/М) but itself devoices to /Ф/ before other voiceless consonants (in the standard language). Final devoicing isn't phonemic in Russian and in particular it might not happen at all when a word starting in a vowel follows, and of course never happens when a word starting in a voiced consonant follows. To us Russians, final devoicing is simply not bothering to voice what should technically be voiced - this is why when pronouncing clearly we might avoid it.


----------



## Quernon

Thanks, and when the word ends with a soft sign the last consonant is still unvoiced, right? The soft sign doesn't change anything?

So just to be clear дождь is _docht_?


----------



## Q-cumber

Quernon said:


> Thanks, and when the word ends with a soft sign the last consonant is still unvoiced, right? The soft sign doesn't change anything?
> 
> So just to be clear дождь is _docht_?


Dosht' or so.


----------



## Awwal12

Quernon said:


> So just to be clear дождь is _docht_?


Дождь is [дошт'] or [дощ].


----------



## Maroseika

Quernon said:


> when the word ends with a soft sign the last consonant is still unvoiced, right? The soft sign doesn't change anything?


It changes only hardness (making consonant soft). But it doesn't influence voicelessness: кров and кровь, лоб and дробь, суд and будь, etc.


----------



## Quernon

Awwal12 said:


> Дождь is [дошт'] or [дощ].


So it can be pronounced either way? Or do you mean that шт' = щ?



Maroseika said:


> It changes only hardness (making consonant soft). But it doesn't influence voicelessness: кров and кровь, лоб and дробь, суд and будь, etc.



Do you pronounce кров and кровь differently? So кроф and крофь?


----------



## Maroseika

Quernon said:


> So it can be pronounced either way? Or do you mean that шт' = щ?


No, шт' ≠ щ, they are different.
Дощ - so called old Moscow standard, дошт' - modern standard.



> Do you pronounce кров and кровь differently? So кроф and крофь?


Yes, of course.


----------



## Awwal12

Maroseika said:


> Дощ - so called old Moscow standard, дошт' - modern standard.


That's a bit of misconception. Etymologically, [дощ] (pl. [даж':и́], now especially rare) is the regular East Slavic form, which resulted from the assibilated East Slavic forms with *ж'дж' < *ж'д'. However, Russian retained the Late Old Russian spelling (reinforced by the Church Slavonic standard). In the end people simply started to read that word as it was spelled (which happened only during the last 100 years or so); for example, in Russian dialects the currently predominant plural form [дажди́] is nearly non-existant (see ДАРЯ, map #53).
Sources of the mid XX century already mention [дошт'] as an _allowable_ form, but state [дош':] as the main one.
Avanesov (1988; the latest orthoepic dictionary) still mentions [дош:'] first and [дошт'] second, but without any remarks.

To me it looks pretty sad (and extremely stupid) that the correct variant may soon become completely oasted due to the purely orthographical reasons and the massive illiteracy.


----------



## C.S.Hy

Sobakus said:


> /В/, originally being a sonorant (and still not exactly a fricative), is transparent to voicing/devoicing like other sonorants (Р/Л/Н/М) but itself devoices to /Ф/ before other voiceless consonants (in the standard language). Final devoicing isn't phonemic in Russian and in particular it might not happen at all when a word starting in a vowel follows, and of course never happens when a word starting in a voiced consonant follows. To us Russians, final devoicing is simply not bothering to voice what should technically be voiced - this is why when pronouncing clearly we might avoid it.


I trully appreciate your informative message. That said, I have my humble understanding about whether the word-final voiced consonants will be devoiced or not.

A. 
Succesive words within an intonational phrase/thought group , in polysyllabic-word/morpheme-dominant languages as Russian and English, are actually pronounced as a long or ultra-long phonological word so that there between words are no significant pauses longer than those between syllables within a single word, hence the same devoicing way of the word-final voiced consonants as those between syllables within a word.

[ By the way, Chinese is monosyllabic-word/morpheme-dominant. Basically,  every syllable is a word and it's normal that a dozen of words share a single syllable. The main devices to recognize a word/morpheme is the syntagmatic (and paradigmatic) relations between words, besides the wider non-textual background. The replacement of any syllable in a phrase may make a great change in sense, or make the construction senseless, or make the listener puzzled.

That means every single syllable in a sentence has to be pronounced with distinct boundaries with another: there is no allowed word-boundary sound linking (nan.an≠na.nan≠nan.nan), there is no sound fusing (-t.s- ≠ -ts-), etc. 

To prevent such sound linking (and syllable-initial voicing), Chinese has its devices: ① all auslaut consonants--stops all: /n ŋ (m ʔ p t k)/ --are unreleased. ② the frequent glottal stop /ʔ/ preceding initial vowels and voiceless consonants.

B.
The reason of the devoicing of the word-final voiced consonants lies in breathing /respiration. During speech people need to keep breathing to maintain their body in good condition and to provide the power and airflow for articulation.

In the course of speech people inhale during the pauses and exhale mainly along with the flow of syllables/words.

Keeping pressure in the airways for a long time will fatigue the muscles associated with breathing, so people usually release as much air as possible at the beginning of a longer pause and then take a deep inhalation, by which to relax the muscles and to gain enough air and power for the coming articulation. Even at a brief pause where people do not often inhale they tend to let out a little of air to somewhat relieve the presure.

When people try to release air out of the respiratory tract, the glottis will coordinatingly open so as for the airway to be clear. The more air released, the wider the glottis. As the glottis is open enough, the vocal cords will not vibrate or create voice. And this is why devoicing often happens at the word
(thought phrase actually) end.

But then there comes the question: why devoicing does not happen in English under the same conditions?  My tentative answer is that the English phonology has checked it. The English phonology has preserved the word/phrase-final voice (as modal or aspirated voiced consonants) to maintain the distiction from the counterpart voiceless consonants, especially the glottalized stops(/tenues). 

The auslaut voiced consonants in English will notablely lengthen the proceeding vowels and the voiced stops will more often keep plosive(as model or aspirated) while their counterpart  voiceless consonants often realized unreleased. 

This is quite similar to the prevention of word/syllable-boundary sound-linking in Chinese: it's more natural and convient for smooth word-flow, but has to be stopped from ambiguity or vagueness.


PS.
The above is my personal theory or understanding and it's likely there to be errors. Discussion and criticism are sincerely welcomed.


----------



## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> and of course never happens when a word starting in a voiced consonant follows.


A little correction: starting in a voiced _plosive or fricative_ consonant (minus /v/, which doesn't cause automatic voicing of the preceding consonants either).


----------



## pimlicodude

Awwal12 said:


> A little correction: starting in a voiced _plosive or fricative_ consonant (minus /v/, which doesn't cause automatic voicing of the preceding consonants either).


If you're pronouncing дождь as [дощ], then in дождь был сильный, it becomes [дож], right?


----------



## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> If you're pronouncing дождь as [дощ], then in дождь был сильный, it becomes [дож], right?


[Дож'] (even if you don't have /ж'/ in your speech - because that's purely phonetic). There is regressive voicing, but no regressive hardening in Russian - only regressive softening in certain positions, and borders of phonetic words aren't transparent for it anyway (cf., however, frequent pronunciations like [с'н'им] or [б'ьз'н'ьво́] - as most prepositions are clitics phonetically, forming a single phonetic word with whatever morphological word follows them).


----------



## Sobakus

@C.S.Hy Your message is very perceptive and touches on several points that I have a lot of personal interest in.

Regarding your point A.: The basic distinction between Chinese and Russian that you describe is termed *word vs syllable language* in the literature - you can see a summary table on page 6 of this PDF. Word-languages are those that do everything to preserve the integrity and distinctness of individual words (which typically have complex shapes), and syllable languages do everything to optimise syllable structure (which they tend to simplify) at the expense of word integrity. Traditionally these are monosyllabic languages like Chinese vs. run-on languages like French.

Languages tend to move between these different types in the course of time. A famous example of this is the short study by Donegan & Stampe (1983) of the difference between Munda and Mon-Khmer languages of SE Asia which belong to diametrically opposite extremes of this continuum yet were the same language a relatively short time ago. This drift can be obviously linked to which type the surrounding languages belong to.​​As you can notice from reading the first of the linked PDFs, final devoicing is a word-language characteristic – its function is to mark word boundaries, as I mentioned in the previous topic. The fact that this devoicing is optional and its application varies reflects the the position of Russian which is closer to the syllable-type end of the continuum. Vowel reduction to schwa is another feature of word languages – after all the unstressed vowels have been dropped, one ends up with a pure word-language like Old Chinese, with very complex syllable structure. As that syllable structure starts to be simplified and consonants start being deleted, tones develop to distinguish the resulting identical syllables (obviously tones must develop before the consonants can be dropped).​​However, I would not group English with Russian on this continuum – to me it seems to be securely in the word-language camp together with Chinese. Most native English vocabulary is monosyllabic, unstressed syllables are very well distinguished from stressed ones, compound words are difficult to distinguish from syntactic phrases, and the run-on of words is prevented by the insertion of glottal stops not just between vowels, but between final consonants and initial vowels as well. English is notorious for its ambiguity in syllable boundaries, so that some even used it to question the existence of the syllable! (I think the correct answer is that it has ambisyllabic consonants which belong to both syllables at once but aren't geminates, as in _flicker_ - the same is true of Dutch and German). This feature is another mark of a word-language.​​Regarding your point B.: You're very much correct that final devoicing is a physiologically-motivated process, and is cross-linguistically common. There are only a few arguable examples of the opposite, i.e. final voicing. And as you correctly mention, this devoicing begins at phrase level, and then gets generalised onto smaller and smaller prosodic constituents until it marks the right end of all phonetic words. In Russian there's still considerable variation in which level it's active at, while in German it obligatorily applies not just to phonetic words, but also to elements of compounds(!).

I think you're likewise right on the money when you say that a language's phonology “checks” this devoicing – in Optimality Theory we would talk about the *F(inal)O(bstruent)V(oicing) constraint (i.e. a ban on it) being ordered lower than the IDENT(voice) constraint which demands preserving the contrast in voicing.

Since words are shorter in English, it cannot afford to sacrifice these contrasts (esp. in its myriad of monosyllables), which are maintained at the expense of articulation difficulty (which in turn is compensated for by the shortness of most English words). The phonetic length difference that you describe is another example of how English optimises word structure to strengthen contrasts. In fact, dialects where this lengthening is active can now afford to sacrifice final obstruent voicing because its contrastive function is already performed by the phonetic vowel length difference. And so we do indeed find many American varieties that now have final devoicing. This is in principle parallel to how the SE Asian tones developed, some of which reflect the former presence and voicing of stops (final as well as in syllable onset).


----------



## Awwal12

I'm not sure if word-final devoicing can be regarded in terms of some "functions". First and foremost, it's plain economy of articulatory efforts; if it happens to have some positive effects beyond that, it's nice but not really the main point. I'd like to point out that such positive effects can only occur before words starting from a vowel, a sonorant or /v/; in the majority of cases, a following plosive or fricative consonant forces its voicing upon the word-final consonant instead.

It should be probably noted that syllable languages typically have a very limited inventory of distinguishable consonants which can appear in the coda in the first place.


----------



## Eirwyn

Sobakus said:


> ᵊThe fact that this devoicing is optional





Sobakus said:


> As I say in the topic linked in my previous message, final devoicing is an optional process in Russian that is felt to be simple “laziness” to voice. Unlike in German, it's not unthinkable to suspend it, and it can be suspended for “clarity” – it's not felt to be a violation of native phonotactics at all (an example of such a violation would be failing to assimilate a consonant cluster by voicing). But when someone who has this process natively does suspend it in continuous speech, one will notice that it actually becomes more difficult to tell words apart, because devoicing marks the right boundaries of words, and without it some word combinations start sounding like single words.


It's definitely not optional for Russian in Russia (Ukrainian Russian is a different story). I doubt that a native speaker would be able to suspend it in continuous speech without preliminary training, and even then he would probably make mistakes, especially in uninflected words, where the voicing of the last consonant can only be deducted from spelling. Technically you're also capable of getting rid of vowel reduction and pronouncing город "letter by letter" as [gɔ-rɔd] (and even in this case it will likely end up sounding like [gɔ-rɔ-dᵊ]), but it doesn't mean that vowel reduction is optional.


----------



## Sobakus

Eirwyn said:


> It's definitely not optional for Russian in Russia


A language where it's not optional is German. Russian is a language where it's plainly optional, can be suspended for clarity, doesn't sound like a mispronunciation, and has considerable variation in its domain of application (as I mention in the previous message). Specifically inside an intonational phrase, /магасаткрыт/ and /магазаткрыт/, /повадуехать/ and /поватуехать/ are equivalent pronunciations; in fact I prefer the variant without devoicing in continuous speech. Come to think, it's possible that what the devoicing does is signal lack of resyllabification of the final consonant, and thus coincides not with prosodic boundaries as such, but with physical speech pauses (however minor).


----------



## Eirwyn

Sobakus said:


> Russian is a language where it's plainly optional, can be suspended for clarity, doesn't sound like a mispronunciation, and has considerable variation in its domain of application


We speak two different Russian languages, then. Pronouncing "магаз открыт" like /магазаткрыт/ would be as unnatural for me as pronouncing "вода" as /вода/.


----------



## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> I'm not sure if word-final devoicing can be regarded in terms of some "functions". First and foremost, it's plain economy of articulatory efforts; if it happens to have some positive effects beyond that, it's nice but not really the main point. I'd like to point out that such positive effects can only occur before words starting from a vowel, a sonorant or /v/; in the majority of cases, a following plosive or fricative consonant forces its voicing upon the word-final consonant instead.


I think you're confusing phonetics with phonology just like when you denied the structural motivation of sound change and claimed it was "stochastic". What you're saying now is just like saying that "lenition of Spanish voiced obstruents is plain economy of articulatory efforts", or the same thing about the Germanic consonant shift. In a world where nothing constraints sound change other than ease of articulation, or generally by what is called by the very dubious term "natural sound change", these sound changes would happen every generation.

Instead, sound change is constrained by phonological structure, which is understood by modern linguistic to be essentially a number of either parameters or constraints set to different settings. These settings are set by the learner during acquisition based on phonetic data, and some of them are correlated or even determined by implication.

When a learner hears final obstruents being devoiced, they can interpret this in many different ways. If they attribute it to general conservation of articulatory effort, then this will be completely ignored and have no effect on settings. If they attribute it as a prosodic boundary marker, then they will set the settings correspondingly and in their grammar, these prosodic boundaries will be marked by devoicing. *This is a function. There is no phonology or linguistic structure without function. *If the learner attributes voiced obstruent devoicing to general allophony not limited to the final position, then in their grammar all voiced obstruents will be allophonically voiceless, and this may involve a chain-shift precisely like the one that happened in Germanic and later High German.

It's instructional to see you say "such positive effects can only occur before words starting from a vowel". In fact this is completely the other way around - it takes less articulatory effort to pronounce a voiced obstruent between vowels than a voiceless one, this is the very basis of lenition by voicing. The fact that you have devoicing is absoltely clear an unambiguous indication that it serves a non-articulatory function. This reflects the process I mention in the previous message as well as throughout this one - when final devoicing is extended to mark word boundaries, *the learner generalises a functionally unmotivated phonetic process into a functionally motivated phonemic rule.*


----------



## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> just like when you denied the structural motivation of sound change and claimed it was "stochastic".


My point was that the cardinal driving force is (unavoidable) stochastic variations while the direction of the changes may be (and quite often are) influenced or even determined by phonology. Presenting phonological structure as a driving force in itself can explain neither the relatively discrete nature of phonetic shifts nor the empirical fact that their time and exact nature cannot be accurately predicted. You do need to have some random factors at play here (and we know such factors well enough).


Sobakus said:


> In a world where nothing constraints sound change other than ease of articulation, or generally by what is called by the very dubious term "natural sound change", these sound changes would happen every generation.


I'm afraid I don't quite follow you. The point was that the devoicing is merely caused by the economy of articulatory efforts - which is naturally allowed by Russian phonology (otherwise, quite obviously, it wouldn't exist). It doesn't really require any more synchronous "reasons" to exist.


----------



## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> A language where it's not optional is German. Russian is a language where it's plainly optional, can be suspended for clarity, doesn't sound like a mispronunciation, and has considerable variation in its domain of application (as I mention in the previous message). Specifically inside an intonational phrase, /магасаткрыт/ and /магазаткрыт/, /повадуехать/ and /поватуехать/ are equivalent pronunciations; in fact I prefer the variant without devoicing in continuous speech. Come to think, it's possible that what the devoicing does is signal lack of resyllabification of the final consonant, and thus coincides not with prosodic boundaries as such, but with physical speech pauses (however minor).


So я рад этому has рад and not рат, right?


----------



## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> My point was that the cardinal driving force is (unavoidable) stochastic variations while the direction of the changes may be (and quite often are) influenced or even determined by phonology. Presenting phonological structure as a driving force in itself can explain neither the relatively discrete nature of phonetic shifts nor the empirical fact that their time and exact nature cannot be accurately predicted. You do need to have some random factors at play here (and we know such factors well enough).


If the same stochastic variations exist in all languages all the time and are the cardinal driving force for sound change, then all langauges should undergo the same sound changes all the time. They must also all change in the same direction. Even forgetting details and the fact that this completely contradicts reality, any explanation that explains why everything happens everywhere all the time is the definition of a non-explanation.

I don't know what stochastic variation you have in mind that is relatively discrete - this sounds like a complete oxymoron to me. The point is precisely that variation is constant and gradual, while *phonemic shifts are rare and discrete.* The fact that they cannot be accurately predicted has nothing to do whatsoever with anything other than lack of information. In a universe where you have all the relevant information they are completely and accurately predictable (forgetting for the moment the current deterministic-indeterministic debate). This tells us nothing about how much of that information is random phonetic variation and how much is psycholinguistic structure.

The random factors at play here is that we know little about how the brain stores linguistic structure, how it interprets phonetic data, or what that phonetic data actually is (the existing case studies on individuals are a drop in the bucket). Again, this is simple lack of information; it's impossible to draw conclusions from ignorance of the data.


Awwal12 said:


> I'm afraid I don't quite follow you. The point was that the devoicing is merely caused by the economy of articulatory efforts - which is naturally allowed by Russian phonology (otherwise, quite obviously, it wouldn't exist). It doesn't really require any more synchronous "reasons" to exist.


My point is that a tendency to phonetic, practically unpredictable (but theoretically predictable) devoicing is a human universal, and the English learner filters it out instead of using it to set their grammar to devoice word-final obstruents. Even if you claim that economy of effort is a "reason" for this phonetic variation, this is completely separate from the "reasons" for the existence of phonemic *phonological, structural* devoicing. The "reasons" for the existence of phonemic phonological structure are a combination of the brain's neural organisation and environmental factors. A major environment factor is *phonetic input,* which is used by the learner to select the settings for parameters - what the learner hears is a "reason" for what they encode in their brain. Once the linguistic information has been encoded in the brain, I don't see any use of talking about any synchronous reasons for its existence.

The dominant framework for explaining structural "reasons" in language is the Optimality Theory, which operates with a cross-linguistically identical set of parameters and constraints. In this framework, the reason for the existence of final devoicing in some languages but not others is the difference in the ordering of these parameters - all languages have the *F(inal)O(bstruent)V(oicing) constraint, but only some of them order it high enough to select the finally-devoiced candidate as Optimal. Again, there are any number of neurological and environmental factors ("reasons") that might influence the setting of these parameters, and we cannot hope to ever be able to know all of them.

Whenever you cannot find some "reasons" for something, it's useful to rephrase the question and start looking for "causes" instead (c.f. the teleological fallacy).


----------



## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> If the same stochastic variations exist in all languages all the time and are the cardinal driving force for sound change, then all langauges should undergo the same sound changes all the time. They must also all change in the same direction.


Non sequitur. Stochastic processes can only provide tiny shifts in a practically random direction. What shift actually *will* happen in the end, though, is an entirely different matter.
Mind you, the pressure of the gas is created by innumerable molecules moving randomly and hitting the surfaces. However, it doesn't mean that the gas will quit a pressure tank with an open valve in an entirely random place!! My bet is definitely on the valve.   But it isn't the valve which makes the gas to leave the tank; it's actually the cynetic energy of its particles which move randomly.


Sobakus said:


> this is completely separate from the "reasons" for the existence of *phonemic, structural* devoicing


Quite likely. Am I missing something or you just postulated there is no phonemic devoicing in Russian? In that case, I don't see what we're arguing about.


----------



## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> So я рад этому has рад and not рат, right?


"I would prefer" is the key word there, I suppose.


----------



## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> Non sequitur. Stochastic processes can only provide tiny shifts in a practically random direction. What shift actually *will* happen in the end, though, is an entirely different matter.
> Mind you, the pressure of the gas is created by innumerable molecules moving randomly and hitting the surfaces. However, it doesn't mean that the gas will quit a pressure tank with an open valve in an entirely random place!! My bet is definitely on the valve.   But it isn't the valve which makes the gas to leave the tank; it's actually the cynetic energy of its particles which move randomly.


I'm sorry but your analogy completely misses the point that language is not a physical object, but a neurobiological system. Specifially language acquisition is *an active process* wherein the learner tries to replicate the target linguistic structure by interpreting the input and setting parameters appropriately. This process is imperfect. The data is imperfect and has constant noise and stochastic variation. This noise is normally compensated for and filtered out. Imperfect learning occurs when this fails, and imperfect learning is not final but can often be corrected, especially if done before a certain age. There are constant "individual sound shifts" inside a populatuion, but only a few of them become accepted speech variants, and only some of these variants are selected by the community to become the new standard. This selection is anything but random, and it's not in any way a passive process like being influenced by a physical force. What changes can be adopted as general by the speech community is constrained (and arguably directed) by linguistic structure.

To pick up your gas tank analogy, if you find one gas tank leaking gas through an open valve, you will say that the reason for this is that someone forgot to close the valve. When the person responsible tells you that no, actually the reason is the random movement of molecules, you might laugh and still fire them. Molecules move in all the tanks, but escape only when the valve is open.


Awwal12 said:


> Quite likely. Am I missing something or you just postulated there is no phonemic devoicing in Russian? In that case, I don't see what we're arguing about.


Of course I wanted to say *phonologically,* as the synonym "structurally" hints. I contrast articulatory/phonetic variation with functional phonological structure.


----------



## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> To pick up your gas tank analogy, if you find one gas tank leaking gas through an open valve, you will say that the reason for this is that someone forgot to close the valve. When the person responsible tells you that no, actually the reason is the random movement of molecules, you might laugh and still fire them.


The actual reason is that we have two factors combined here. And I was specifically discussing the *driving force* behind phonetic shifts.


----------



## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> The actual reason is that we have two factors combined here. And I was specifically discussing the *driving force* behind phonetic shifts.


Random articulatory variation is a background constant, not a driving force for phonological change. It's present everywhere all the time and has no explanatory power. Phonological structure has functions, and the phonological rule of devoicing has a function of marking word boundaries - this is completely self-evident. Functions are not teleological, as you might be thinking in terms of teleological "reasons for". Phonological structure is functional in the same sense as all language is functional. Sound shifts draw upon the pool of random background variation to produce structural changes. Importantly, the random background variation itself must be phonologically determined to some extent - for example Italian allows much less vowel quality variation and reduction than Serbian.


----------



## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> Random articulatory variation is a background constant, not a driving force for phonological change.


I beg to differ. No phonological changes would ever happen without it. And, potentially, the direction of phonetic developments can be random (when several developments are phonologically possible) - exactly because of the stochastic nature of that driving force.


----------



## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> I beg to differ. No phonological changes would ever happen without it.


A change in the direction of parsing for stress assignment is an excellent example of the opposite. A change in syllabification is a simpler example of the same. A third example is acquisition being determined by the learner's other languages. Learners can interpret the same data in different ways, resulting in different grammars. Here's three influential phonologists emphatically making the same point. You're again crucially missing the point that language change originates in acquisition, and remains structurally determined at every consequent stage.


Awwal12 said:


> And, potentially, the direction of phonetic developments can be random (when several developments are phonologically possible) - exactly because of the stochastic nature of that driving force.


You can only say that these developlents are random when you have accounted for all the data and all the phonological structure and haven't found any difference, which is practically impossible. See my point about sufficient information.


----------



## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> So я рад этому has рад and not рат, right?


With рад I prefer devoicing for some reason, but not in повод уехать. The main point is my preference in each case isn't categorical, which speaks for the optionality of the process. I suspect there may be syntactic or other factors involved, or even simple exposure to either variant.


----------



## nizzebro

pimlicodude said:


> So я рад этому has рад and not рат, right?


Speaking of "рад этому", I bet that in a natural conversation, you would rather hear "Я этому рад" or simply "я рад".
The issue, not always  being paid much attention is that the basis of the language is speech, not text.

When reading "рад этому" aloud, I personally could make д in that phrase voiced, to be more clear for a person listening to me.

But in naturally constructed sentences, I believe speakers tend to avoid such non-comfortable phrases semi-consciously  - unless they have an intention to sound formal for some purpose.


----------



## C.S.Hy

I, as a Russian beginner, have no idea whether the intonation phrase-final devoicing in Russian is a marker of a phrase boundary. I highly doubt it. Especially, whether a native speaker is doing the devoicing as a signal: "Hey, please note here's the boundary", consciously or subconsciously. -- I don't think the speaker's purpose or psychology is irrelevant.

Basically I don't think it's a boundary marker but a natural (and allowed in Russian phonology) physical action, to release some air and reduce the presure in the subway so that the associate articulatory muscles would be somewhat comfortable. What serves as the boundary marker of an intonation phrase is the pause (silence）between phrases.

An intonation phrase is a sequence of succesive words, and "in Russian (or English), for example, phonetically a series of syllables without notable difference than those within a long word".


(<<<< Help needed!  I'm not sure about the supposition in the quotation marks. Native Russian (and English) speakers, could you please tell me if you take the word boundaris serious and think they must be phonetically shown to the listener in a phrase when（when←that） you speak the succesive words quickly and smoothly? And if yes, how do you manage to show the boundaries? >>>>)


If the hypothesis above tenable, then when the devoicing will happen depends on where you mean to give a pause(*):

a. if a voiced obstruent is at the end of an intonation phrase in Russian, the devoicing is highly likely happen（unless you  intenionally pronounce it voicedly to show the origional sound there of a word).

b. word-final voiced obstruents which are not at the end of an intonation phrase will share the same rules of devoicing within a word: to devoice only before voiceless obstruents and not to devoice before vowels, sonorants and voiced obstruents.


(* Possible intonation phrases have to be semantically and grammatically reasonable. Where to specifically put a pause hinges on your expressing need and purpose.)

As for я рад этому, either я рад, рад этому,  or я  рад этому is semantically and grammatically possible. The first will have devoicing of д, with этому spoken supplementarilly or emphathetically, for example. And in the latter two phrases there would normally be no the devoiced д.


----------



## pimlicodude

C.S.Hy said:


> I, as a Russian beginner, have no idea whether the intonation phrase-final devoicing in Russian is a marker of a phrase boundary. I highly doubt it. Especially, whether a native speaker is doing the devoicing as a signal of "Hey, please note here's the boundary", consciously or subconsciously. -- I don't think the speaker's purpose or psychology is irrelevant.
> 
> Basically I don't think it's a boundary marker but a natural (and allowed in Russian phonology) physical action, to release some air and reduce the presure in the subway so that the associate articulatory muscles would be somewhat comfortable. What serves as the boundary marker of an intonation phrase is the pause (silence）between phrases.
> 
> An intonation phrase is a sequence of succesive words, and "in Russian (or English), for example, phonetically a series of syllables without notable difference than those within a long word".
> 
> 
> (<<<< Help needed!  I'm not sure about the supposition in the quotation marks. Native Russian (and English) speakers, could you please tell me if you take the word boundaris serious and think they must be phonetically shown to the listener in a phrase that you speak the succesive words quickly and smoothly? And if yes, how do you manage to show the boundaries? >>>>)
> 
> 
> If the hypothesis above tenable, then when the devoicing will happen depends on where you mean to give a pause(*):
> 
> a. if a voiced obstruent is at the end of an intonation phrase in Russian, the devoicing is highly likely happen（unless you  intenionally pronounce it voicedly to show the origional sound there of a word).
> 
> b. word-final voiced obstruents which are not at the end of an intonation phrase will share the same rules of devoicing within a word: to devoice only before voiceless obstruents and not to devoice before vowels, sonorants and voiced obstruents.
> 
> 
> (* Possible intonation phrases have to be semantically and grammatically reasonable. Where to specifically put a pause hinges on your expressing need and purpose.)
> 
> As for я рад этому, either я рад, рад этому,  or я  рад этому is semantically and grammatically possible. The first will have devoicing of д, with этому spoken supplementarilly or emphathetically, for example. And in the latter two phrases there would normally be no the devoiced д.


I think, in English, the fact that most words have a stressed syllable (grammatical words like "in" and "of" will be unstressed) serves to show the division into words. Aspiration of plosives also helps as well, because k, p, t and ch are aspirated at the start of a word as well as at the start of a stressed syllable. There may be other factors I haven't realised.


----------



## Maroseika

C.S.Hy said:


> As for я рад этому, either я рад, рад этому,  or я  рад этому is semantically and grammatically possible. The first will have devoicing of д, with этому spoken supplementarilly or emphathetically, for example. And in the latter two phrases there would normally be no the devoiced д.


Д is devoiced in all your examples.


----------



## C.S.Hy

pimlicodude said:


> I think, in English, the fact that most words have a stressed syllable (grammatical words like "in" and "of" will be unstressed) serves to show the division into words. Aspiration of plosives also helps as well, because k, p, t and ch are aspirated at the start of a word as well as at the start of a stressed syllable. There may be other factors I haven't realised.


Helpful answer！🙌🙌
Some native English speakers say my English is hard to understand.☹️☹️ Could you please tell me what the problems are with my English？😳😳


----------



## pimlicodude

C.S.Hy said:


> Helpful answer！🙌🙌
> Some native English speakers say my English is hard to understand.☹️☹️ Could you please tell me what the problems are with my English？😳😳


I mainly want to discuss Russian in this forum. I understood your posts.


----------



## nizzebro

C.S.Hy said:


> I, as a Russian beginner, have no idea whether the intonation phrase-final devoicing in Russian is a marker of a phrase boundary. I highly doubt it. Especially, whether a native speaker is doing the devoicing as a signal of "Hey, please note here's the boundary", consciously or subconsciously. -- I don't think the speaker's purpose or psychology is irrelevant.





C.S.Hy said:


> An intonation phrase is a sequence of succesive words, and "in Russian (or English), for example, phonetically a series of syllables without notable difference than those within a long word".
> 
> (<<<< Help needed! I'm not sure about the supposition in the quotation marks. Native Russian (and English) speakers, could you please tell me if you take the word boundaris serious and think they must be phonetically shown to the listener in a phrase that you speak the succesive words quickly and smoothly? And if yes, how do you manage to show the boundaries? >>>>)


Yes, devoicing has nothing to do with phrase boundaries - the latter is a matter of two factors: the words used, and, pitch line as conforming to the information structure. So the point is only the word boundary - which is determined by two factors: subtle delays/stops which however may disappear with a high tempo (especially delays after final vowels), and, relational analysis of the received content, including, again, the pitch used.

Let's take these : "...наро́д Аме́рики..." and "оборо́т Аме́рики" - normally I would pronounce д/т in the same way here regardless of the speech tempo. I _could _make д voiced - but, that is a clearly intentional and prepared thing (and basically some kind of showing off - a posh way to make it sound clear and elegant).
In both cases there is a stop between words which, however, becomes tiny with a high tempo.
If in the above phrase we replace Аме́рики with А́фрики - so that the first syllable is now stressed, then, even with a high tempo  I would have to make some more effort in suppressing the airflow - because, you know, the syllable stress is an important thing you cannot ruin - but, to connect two stressed syllables you need a stop between them.


----------



## Awwal12

nizzebro said:


> Let's take these : "...наро́д Аме́рики..." and "оборо́т Аме́рики" - normally I would pronounce д/т in the same way here regardless of the speech tempo. I _could _make д voiced - but, that is a clearly intentional and prepared thing (and basically some kind of showing off - a posh way to make it sound clear and elegant).


...and makes distinguishing "народ" and "народы" problematic in fast speech.


----------



## nizzebro

I would sum up the general principle of words discretization in Russian like this (in descending order of prominence):

1. Pitch lift-ups marking stressed syllables
2. Recognizing common morphology patterns (Sobakus referred to that, if I understood right)
3. Additional pitch variation caused by informational focusing
4. Stops between words, which might appear much more prominent  e.g. with clusters of short, especially monosyllabic, words that do not form set phrases or stable patterns, but rather represent arbitrary combinations; especially, in lack of the factor #3.


----------



## Awwal12

nizzebro said:


> Pitch lift-ups marking stressed syllables


Those are lift-ups only by default. The stressed syllables are always the focal points of intonation one way or another, though.


----------



## nizzebro

Awwal12 said:


> Those are lift-ups only by default. The stressed syllables are always the focal points of intonation one way or another, though.


Hmm... I'd say that, on a stressed syllable, the base frequency always is going a little up and down - even if the jump is tiny.
Of course, there is also the factor of vowel reduction or its absence, but, the pitch seems to me the permanent factor. If we take the robotic voice, neither timbre nor level nor length difference in vowels would bring it closer to the natural voice in that respect; but, as soon as we add pitch lifting, the effect of syllable stress appears.

However, I should add that the notion of pitch itself might be confusing for learners: that doesn't mean you should speak in falsetto voice on stressed vowels in Russian, of course.


----------



## Awwal12

nizzebro said:


> Hmm... I'd say that, on a stressed syllable, the base frequency always is going a little up and down - even if the jump is tiny.


Under some circumstances it can be the *lowest* point as well.


----------



## C.S.Hy

Awwal12 said:


> Under some circumstances it can be the *lowest* point as well.


Yes, I think that depends on whether the intonational stress is rising or falling there. 

And I notice, as it seems to me, whether pitch rising or dropping on the stressed vowel/syllable, the highest point of pitch often does not fall on the stressed vowel/syllable, but on its previous one. 

In the falling intonation, the the highest point of pitch may fall on either the stressed syllable or its previous one, and in the rising intonation, the highest point of pitch first falls on the previous syllable and then there is a sharp drop down to the stressed syllable, then over its full and long vowel the pitch is rising from the lowest level. 

I wonder if my observation is telling the truth.


----------



## nizzebro

C.S.Hy said:


> and in the rising intonation, the highest point of pitch first falls on the previous syllable and then there is a sharp drop down to the stressed syllable, then over its full and long vowel the pitch is rising from the lowest level.


I cannot agree with this in general - from what I can see, the short peaks of a stressed vowel are higher - except when the speaker intentionally puts focus on unstressed syllables. Note I mean the base tone, not harmonics.
Anyway, regardless of the absolute pitch, stressed vowels show higher volatility - that is, pitch variation within that particular vowel.
 I have an idea (probably speculative) that it is exactly this quick slide that mostly makes the stressed vowel sound "louder" than the previous one. Take for example a word like котЫ or паУк. In both of them, the first syllable is a-like, which has a richer spectra, so it tends to grab the stress - but, a pitch slide on the stressed vowel compensates that, because during that slide, different frequencies are touched - but as that happens within a really short period of time, the listener's brain does not recognize it as a sweep and instead  considers it as a portion with a richer spectra, summing up the frequency bands touched.


----------



## Sobakus

C.S.Hy said:


> I, as a Russian beginner, have no idea whether the intonation phrase-final devoicing in Russian is a marker of a phrase boundary. I highly doubt it. Especially, whether a native speaker is doing the devoicing as a signal of "Hey, please note here's the boundary", consciously or subconsciously. -- I don't think the speaker's purpose or psychology is irrelevant.
> 
> Basically I don't think it's a boundary marker but a natural (and allowed in Russian phonology) physical action, to release some air and reduce the presure in the subway so that the associate articulatory muscles would be somewhat comfortable. What serves as the boundary marker of an intonation phrase is the pause (silence）between phrases.
> 
> An intonation phrase is a sequence of succesive words, and "in Russian (or English), for example, phonetically a series of syllables without notable difference than those within a long word".


I'm afraid this is incorrect. As I've said before, final devoicing in Russian is a regular phonological process and not a random artifact of human articulatory physiology. It's not there for taking a breath - this is only its origin. It's been generalised from this to apply to the end of smaller and smaller constituents and now generally applies at the word level regardless of whether there's a pause. Therefore its function is to mark word boundaries, and as I've mentioned, failing to devoice can make two words sound like one by obscuring the word boundary.

Sometimes (as in the examples I gave) it fails to apply to words but instead to Intonational Phrases, which is the level above the Phonological Word. In which case it marks IP boundary.

In English, sequences of words are much better distinguished from single words than in Russian - also as already mentioned. This involves a number of processes. You may wish to create a topic on the Etymology forum to discuss this.


C.S.Hy said:


> b. word-final voiced obstruents which are not at the end of an intonation phrase will share the same rules of devoicing within a word: to devoice only before voiceless obstruents and not to devoice before vowels, sonorants and voiced obstruents.


This isn't the case. Word-final stops obstruents not followed by a pause are normally devoiced. They're voiced again before a following *voiced* obstruent, but not before liquids sonorants or vowels. When this doesn't happen, the regular devoicing process hasn't applied or was suspended.

Russian also has a general devoicing of everything, but this time at the end of an Utterance. There not just obstruents devoice, but sonorants and vowels as well! Especially the high vowels у/и. This too is not purely articulatory and has its stylistic functions. The vowel devoicing has a parallel in French, where too it's mainly high vowels that devoice - here's a topic on this, unfortunately in French. But whereas in French it's a regular phonological process, in Russian it's optional, stylistic (informal carelessness that signals being relaxed), or just means you've run out of breath


----------



## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> This isn't the case. Word-final stops not followed by a pause are normally devoiced. They're voiced again before a following *voiced* obstruent, but not before liquids or vowels. When this doesn't happen, the regular devoicing process hasn't applied or was suspended.


Thank you. I wasn't previously aware - or just hadn't noted - that there is an exception to voicing before liquids. I take this to mean L and N. So in у моих друзей the x becomes a voiced fricative, but in у моих лесов it doesn't (I couldn't think of any words starting with л off the top of my head!).

EDIT: I have removed the typo "bore" and replaced by "before"!


----------



## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> Thank you. I wasn't previously aware - or just hadn't noted - that there is an exception to voicing bore liquids. I take this to mean L and N. So in у моих друзей the x becomes a voiced fricative, but in у моих лесов it doesn't (I couldn't think of any words starting with л off the top of my head!).


That's right, and I should have said sonorants, of which liquids (l, r) are only one type. I'm sure you'll recall that /v/ works like a sonorant as well.


----------



## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> That's right, and I should have said sonorants, of which liquids (l, r) are only one type. I'm sure you'll recall that /v/ works like a sonorant as well.


There is a forvo reading of на моих внучат where the х sounds voiced: на моих внучат pronunciation: How to pronounce на моих внучат in Russian


----------



## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> There is a forvo reading of на моих внучат where the х sounds voiced: на моих внучат pronunciation: How to pronounce на моих внучат in Russian


I'd call this half-voiced - I'm struggling to put it squarely into either camp, but there's no voicing there ordinarily. I think it has to do with the v-medial cluster and the awkward sonority ordering inside it, /xvn/, lower-higher-lower. At least /v/ should count as more sonorous than /n/ if it's phonologically a sonorant; as a fricative it should be lower. Maybe this ambiguity is also to blame.

p.s.: unlike Awwal12, it doesn't sound weird to me - it would if it were fully voiced.


----------



## Awwal12

pimlicodude said:


> There is a forvo reading of на моих внучат where the х sounds voiced


...And it sounds real weird.


----------



## pimlicodude

I've just noticed Dahl's entry in Wikipedia - totally incorrectly given as Vladimir Dal there - and the IPA given for his name is [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɨˈvanəvʲɪdʑ ˈdalʲ], showing voicing of the final consonant of Иванович.


----------



## C.S.Hy

pimlicodude said:


> I've just noticed Dahl's entry in Wikipedia - totally incorrectly given as Vladimir Dal there - and the IPA given for his name is [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɨˈvanəvʲɪdʑ ˈdalʲ], showing voicing of the final consonant of Иванович.


I think although"/…vʲɪdʑ ˈdalʲ/" is possible and natural in smooth and fairly quick speech, such as in everyday conversation, it'd be better to be transcribed as /… ɨˈvanəvʲtɕ ˈdalʲ/  there in the context, as /…vʲtɕ ˈdalʲ/ is the original pronunciation and still possible in slower speech.


----------



## Sobakus

C.S.Hy said:


> I think although"/…vʲɪdʑ ˈdalʲ/" is possible and natural in smooth and fairly quick speech, such as in everyday conversation, it'd be better to be transcribed as /… ɨˈvanəvʲtɕ ˈdalʲ/  there in the context, as /…vʲtɕ ˈdalʲ/ is the original pronunciation and still possible in slower speech.


This completely depends on the presence of the pause. If the name is pronounced together, the consonant can only be voiced, never voiceless. Otherwise it can only be voiceless. Speaking tempo has no influence on this. The together-pronunciation of names is clearly the default, so Wikipedia's transcription is good.


----------



## C.S.Hy

Sobakus said:


> This completely depends on the presence of the pause. If the name is pronounced together, the consonant can only be voiced, never voiceless. Otherwise it can only be voiceless. Speaking tempo has no influence on this. The together-pronunciation of names is clearly the default, so Wikipedia's transcription is good.


Basically what I meant to say, consistent with my previous discussion, and not trying to steal your opinion😃. I was avoiding using the word "pause" so as not to collide head-on with some discussion participants, although that's not serious at all.

But I don't think the speaking tempo has nothing to do with the pause. Quick speech means reducing the span of time of pauses between words and usually between phrases, besides likely shortening of the sounds, especially vowels.


----------



## Sobakus

C.S.Hy said:


> Basically what I meant to say, consistent with my previous discussion, and not trying to steal your opinion😃. I was avoiding using the word "pause" so as not to collide head-on with some discussion participants, although that's not serious at all.
> 
> But I don't think the speaking tempo has nothing to do with the pause. Quick speech means reducing the span of time of pauses between words and usually between phrases, besides likely shortening of the sounds, especially vowels.


But I thought we were on the same page about there being no pauses between words in Russian inside the Intonational Phonological Phrase (got that wrong in the earlier messages), unlike in Chinese - you said it yourself. Accordingly, speech tempo does not increase or reduce them. You can speak totally in slow motion and still group words into PPs, which among other things means there will be no pauses between them. When the last consonant of Иванович occurs inside the same PP as the first consonant of Даль, the two consonants *come into contact,* and they have to assimilate by voicing. This assimilation is categorical and speed-independent. What happens at higher speech tempos is that pauses between PPs (i.e. inside the Intonational Phrase) as well as IPs (inside the Utterance) can get deleted as well, and the consonants come into contact, with the same result.


----------



## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> But I thought we were on the same page about there being no pauses between words in Russian inside an Intonational Phrase, unlike in Chinese - you said it yourself. Accordingly, speech tempo does not increase or reduce them. You can speak totally in slow motion and still group words into IPs, which among other things means there will be no pauses. When the last consonant of Иванович occurs inside the same IP as the first consonant of Даль, they will have to assimilate by voicing. This assimilation is categorical.


It is worth pointing out it is actually Иванныч...


----------



## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> It is worth pointing out it is actually Иванныч...


Well, that's a stylistic variant that can be used, but doesn't have to be; specifically it wouldn't be used in formal speech other than to express personal familiarity with the person. Also the -н- is a singleton.


----------



## nizzebro

pimlicodude said:


> There is a forvo reading of на моих внучат where the х sounds voiced: на моих внучат pronunciation: How to pronounce на моих внучат in Russian


It's just a personal voice problem, probably it cracks on vowels so he cannot make the transition accurate.


----------



## C.S.Hy

Sobakus said:


> But I thought we were on the same page about there being no pauses between words in Russian inside the Intonational Phonological Phrase (got that wrong in the earlier messages), unlike in Chinese - you said it yourself. Accordingly, speech tempo does not increase or reduce them. You can speak totally in slow motion and still group words into PPs, which among other things means there will be no pauses between them. When the last consonant of Иванович occurs inside the same PP as the first consonant of Даль, they have to assimilate by voicing. This assimilation is categorical and speed-independent. What happens at higher speech tempos is that pauses between PPs (i.e. inside the Intonational Phrase) may be deleted as well, with the same result.
> View attachment 72164


I like the chart.


----------



## C.S.Hy

Please check my pronunciation of  добродетельный (Edit: new link, more convenient than before) and point out the imperfections or mistakes.


----------



## C.S.Hy

This is the first time that I've tried to attatch a file to the post in this forum. The pop-up message said the file extention was not one of the allowed. It said .m4a is allowed and my file was just with  the same extension. Can anybody help me with that？


----------



## Sobakus

C.S.Hy said:


> This is the first time that I try to attatch a file to the post in this forum. The pop-up message said the file extention was not one of the allowed. It said .m4a is allowed and my file was just with  the same extension. Can anybody help me with that？


I suggest using Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive or some other file storage with direct playback.


----------



## C.S.Hy

Sobakus said:


> I suggest using Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive or some other file storage with direct playback.


Thank you and I've give the link to listen to the audio.


----------



## C.S.Hy

It doesn't seem difficult for me to make the hard voiced б, д, г, but I have difficulty to make the soft ones of them. A new pronunciation of добродетельный (edit: link. And the page for the audio if the previous link doesn't work).


----------



## Sobakus

C.S.Hy said:


> Thank you and I've give the link to listen to the audio.





C.S.Hy said:


> Please check my pronunciation of  добродетельный and point out the imperfections or mistakes.


_Oh my, that website is something else - it plays sponsored music ads both before and after playing what you actually want to hear! To skip the before-ad, you need to click on the big playback button again, and then you have to manually stop the post-ad or you get bad music blasted into your ears. Please have mercy on us and use a normal file storage! _

The only thing that stands out as incorrect in your recording is the /r/, which sounds slurred and retroflex (curled-back) as in Chinese. It's difficult to judge the correct voicing of the stops because there's too few of them and there's no variety of environments - word- and phrase-initial, medial, final.

Do get accurate feedback you need to pick a small passage of text - even a couple of sentences will do. The important thing is that we should be able to hear voiced and voiceless consonants in different environments, so we can tell whether you're making a proper contrast between them.


C.S.Hy said:


> It doesn't seem difficult for me to make the hard voiced б, д, г, but I have difficulty to make the soft ones of them.


Just the voiced ones and not the voiceless? That would be really strange, as they're articulated practically identially, while voicing is completely separate and happens way up your vocal tract. If it's just the softness that makes you stumble, you should create a separate topic for discussing that.


----------



## C.S.Hy

Sobakus said:


> _Oh my, that website is something else - it plays sponsored music ads both before and after playing what you actually want to hear! To skip the before-ad, you need to click on the big playback button again, and then you have to manually stop the post-ad or you get bad music blasted into your ears. Please have mercy on us and use a normal file storage! _
> 
> The only thing that stands out as incorrect in your recording is the /r/, which sounds slurred and retroflex (curled-back) as in Chinese. It's difficult to judge the correct voicing of the stops because there's too few of them and there's no variety of environments - word- and phrase-initial, medial, final.
> 
> Do get accurate feedback you need to pick a small passage of text - even a couple of sentences will do. The important thing is that we should be able to hear voiced and voiceless consonants in different environments, so we can tell whether you're making a proper contrast between them.
> 
> Just the voiced ones and not the voiceless? That would be really strange, as they're articulated practically identially, while voicing is completely separate and happens way up your vocal tract. If it's just the softness that makes you stumble, you should create a separate topic for discussing that.


Thank you very much for bothering to listen to and check my pronunciation.

The previous audio-sharing website is really inconvenient and even boring. I've found a new one and renewed the second link to my pronunciation there at the site. I think I'll offer more pronunciations/aloud-reading later.

The reason for the difficulty for me to make voiced stops, I think, is to involuntarily or subconsciously put a glottal stop at the beginning of a stop, which makes the vocal folds not vibrate initially, that is, only voiceless stops are produced. This kind of phonation is typical in Chinese pronunciation, for fear of voicing, and that draws strong influence on my Russian pronunciation.

How ever, knowing how is one thing; to acquire a Russian phonational habit is another. It takes time and effort. It seems that for me the palatalization is apt to trigger off the glottal stop. Strange may it be, but probably true.


----------



## C.S.Hy

As for the pronunciation of P /r/, that is a story. Actually I've been teaching  it 😂 to people who are troubled by making the sound (, with the tongue not to set out to vibrate). And then they've been able to make much better trills than me, 🙄 as I have a short, round and thick tongue so that it does not easily trill. My tongue tip can only reach out of the mouth as far as one centimeter while most people can reach out three centimeters or more with ease. I can manage to make a decent or fair trill, with quite some effort and a bit awkward position though. So I make flap much more than trill. And as the trill is difficult for my tongue, I think I'll not be trying to make the soft, continuous, lovely-sounding trill that reminds you the sound of the butterfly fluttering its wings. I envy those people who have long, thin and soft tongues that easily make the perfect trill, but I don't covet the same.


----------



## C.S.Hy

By the way, to respond to your earnest regard for my pronunciation of soft consonants, I'd like to say that I really felt some difficulty at first in making certain soft consonants, but I then found a way to cope with it: just to imagine to make a following и/й of the (hard) consonant and the middle tongue will easily and naturally raise to a proper position to make the counterpart soft one.

（ Quite some part of my posts are based on my personal practice and understanding. Discussion is welcomed.)


----------



## pimlicodude

C.S.Hy said:


> It doesn't seem difficult for me to make the hard voiced б, д, г, but I have difficulty to make the soft ones of them. A new pronunciation of добродетельный (edit: link).


I'm not a native speaker and so cannot make any cogent comments. But the replies you received all focused on the /r/. But I heard that as добротетельный, with /t/ and not /d/. I may be wrong. Maybe the native speakers can comment on the first medial д  in particular and comment on whether it sounded like т or not. Note: I'm also a learner and am not claiming my version would be better, but you specifically welcome comments.


----------



## Sobakus

@C.S.Hy Your theory about pre-glottalised stops in Mandarin sounds plausible in general - Googling tells me it's possible that Old Chinese had pre-glottalised stops, and Wu even has pre-glottalised sonorants. It would fit with your observation that Chinese is very strict on marking phonetic word boundaries. Russian articulation is the exact opposite of that - I don't think we have any glottal articulations at all, and glottal stops are used only in very carefully articulated speech for the sake of distinction and emphasis. Russian needs to be slurred to sound proper.

I would like to avoid derailing this topic by discussing /r/. I'll just mention that most Russian /r/s are taps and the occasional trills are no longer than 3 vibrations.


pimlicodude said:


> I'm not a native speaker and so cannot make any cogent comments. But the replies you received all focused on the /r/. But I heard that as добротетельный, with /t/ and not /d/. I may be wrong. Maybe the native speakers can comment on the first medial д  in particular and comment on whether it sounded like т or not. Note: I'm also learner and am not claiming my version would be better, but you specifically welcome comments.


Your observation is in fact totally correct, but I decided not to focus on this because even the initial /d/ sounded under-voiced to me. That medial /t/ sounds mushy, like it's even articulated further back – alveolar when it should be dental. I'll simply repeat however that I don't think it's appropriate to make extended comments on this from a single recording of a single word. A longer and more varied recording is needed to generalise. For what it's worth, in my experience, few Chinese natives get voiced stops correct all of the time, in Russian or otherwise.


C.S.Hy said:


> It doesn't seem difficult for me to make the hard voiced б, д, г, but I have difficulty to make the soft ones of them. A new pronunciation of добродетельный (edit: link).


Unfortunatley it's "Page not found" for me - perhaps the recording was deleted because this is a website for uploading sound samples for use in audio production. You should really consider using Dropbox - download a VPN extension if it's blocked where you are.


----------



## pimlicodude

You can also use vocaroo.com for small audio files.


----------



## Sobakus

But these get deleted after a few months and this is very unhelpful on a long-standing forum where necroposting and necroreading is the order of the day.


----------



## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> But these get deleted after a few months and this is very unhelpful on a long-standing forum where necroposting and necroreading is the order of the day.


I didn’t realise that.


----------



## C.S.Hy

pimlicodude said:


> You can also use vocaroo.com for small audio files.


I just tried the website only to find it  was blocked, then through a VPN I got there and was surprised: the service was extraordinarily easy and convenient to use. Here is a recording：Добродетельный (readings on that website allegedly to be deleted every few months. This is just a try).  And the recording clarity is rather high because the service has its own denoiser. I think I'll bookmark the site for future temporary and occasional use.


----------



## pimlicodude

There is no such word as "voicelessing" in English. It's a very irritating thread title as a result. "Voiceless" is not a verb. "Devoicing" would be correct here.


----------



## C.S.Hy

pimlicodude said:


> There is no such word as "voicelessing" in English. It's a very irritating thread title as a result. "Voiceless" is not a verb. "Devoicing" would be correct here.


Yes, I agree. And where did it ("voicelessing") apprear as in a threat title?


----------



## pimlicodude

C.S.Hy said:


> Yes, I agree. And where did it ("voicelessing") apprear as in a threat title?


The *thread title is "Хлеб (last consonant voicelessing)". You can edit it by clicking on the button at the top right of the thread.


----------



## C.S.Hy

pimlicodude said:


> The *thread title is "Хлеб (last consonant voicelessing)". You can edit it by clicking on the button at the top right of the thread.


Sorry but this is not my original thread. I created a thread “What if П for Б” on a similar object but it's set as "not open to further replies" for some reason.


----------



## pimlicodude

C.S.Hy said:


> Sorry but this is not my original thread. I created a thread “What if П for Б” on a similar object but it's set "not open to further replies" for some reason.


I'm sorry. I forgot that this is an old thread from 2018!


----------



## Sobakus

C.S.Hy said:


> Here is a recording：Добродетельный (readings on that website allegedly to be deleted every few months. This is just a try).


Yep, same as pimlicodude has observed for the previous recording, you say /тете/ instead of /дете/. I suggest picking a sentence where changing the stop will change the meaning (called a minimal pair), pronouncing it several times and asking us to tell you which is which. Sounds that your language doesn't distinguish should be learned in this way - your brain must learn to associate the difference in sound with a difference in meaning.

You can try pairs such as дом/том (house/tome), те́ло/де́ло (body/business), творе́ц/дворе́ц (creator/palace), бо́гу/бо́ку (god/anatomical side, Dative), ба́бочка/па́почка (butterfly/daddy), правый/бравый (right/gallant), коне́ц/гоне́ц (end/courier), лу́ка/лу́га (shooting-bow or onion/lawn, Genitive), кот/год (cat/year), крип/гриб (creep [slang]/mushroom), во́т и/во́ды (and so/waters).


----------



## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> Yep, same as pimlicodude has observed for the previous recording, you say /тете/ instead of /дете/. I suggest picking a sentence where changing the stop will change the mining (called a minimal pair), pronouncing it several times and asking us to tell you which is which. Sounds that your language doesn't distinguish should be learned in this way - your brain must learn to associate the difference in sound with a difference in meaning.
> 
> You can try pairs such as дом/том (house/tome), те́ло/де́ло (body/business), творе́ц/дворе́ц (creator/palace), бо́гу/бо́ку (god/anatomical side, Dative), ба́бочка/па́почка (butterfly/daddy), правый/бравый (right/gallant), коне́ц/гоне́ц (end/courier), лу́ка/лу́га (shooting-bow or onion/lawn, Genitive).


There's also the interesting pronunciation of этак as эдак (does the word да derive etymologically from так?).


----------



## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> There's also the interesting pronunciation of этак as эдак (does the word да derive etymologically from так?).


Check this out on wiktionary.


----------



## pimlicodude

Sobakus said:


> Check this out on wiktionary.


It seems that at a very early date the Proto-Indo-European /d/ became /t/ in early Slavic.


----------



## Sobakus

pimlicodude said:


> It seems that at a very early date the Proto-Indo-European /d/ became /t/ in early Slavic.


But it gives two different PIE roots, one with d and the other with t.


----------



## C.S.Hy

@Sobakus

My try to differentiate voiced and voiceless stops


----------



## C.S.Hy

Another practice：Добродетельный


----------



## Sobakus

C.S.Hy said:


> @Sobakus
> 
> My try to differentiate voiced and voiceless stops


These all sound correct as far as the stops are concerned (only во́т и was supposed to be pronounced together as во́ты). Now you need to build some phrases or sentences using these words, so that you have to concentrate on more than just one word, and preferrably so that the contrasting sound occurs in that phrase as well. For example:

Том и Дже́рри (дж is two consonants), дом и две́ри, дом в Твери́
де́ло лете́ло, а те́ло гляде́ло
творе́ц сотвори́л дворе́ц
с како́го бо́ку подойти́ к бо́гу?
бра́вый па́почка пойма́л ба́бочку
гоне́ц с луко́м дости́г конца́ лу́га
ну и крипо́вый гриб!
вот и во́ды!
Remember that every initial и after final hard consonants is pronounced as ы.


C.S.Hy said:


> Another practice：Добродетельный


You still say добротетельный all 3 times =\


----------



## nizzebro

C.S.Hy said:


> Another practice：Добродетельный


It's pretty good; to make д perfect, treat it as a temporary narrowing between two vowels  like that in 'ое' (oje) -  in both cases, vocal folds do not stop vibrating and there is only a really short and pretty gentle suppressing of airflow; for д, it differs only in that now it is the front part of the tongue which goes up (but, it is a pretty large spot, with energy centered closer to the middle so it does not become that concave as in English).


----------



## C.S.Hy

Video: speaking Russian in the Chinese way. 😄

You may see that the Chinese girl is talking with every syllable separated from another, different from the Russian way in which sentences are spoken in the phonological word or intonational phrase.

* The Chinese girl in the video is a Russian language teacher. Her Russian pronunciation is pretty good, and she's pretending a poor one only for shooting the video.

* In Chinese pauses within an intonational/thought phrase are usually indicated/realized by lengthening the (nuclear) vowel rather than by silence. The syllable structure of Mandarin/standard Chinese is (Consonant)-(glide)-Vowel-(semi-vowel/nasal), roughly C-V. The glide is from the group /j, w, ɥ/, the semi-vowel is from /ɪ,ʊ/, and the nasal is from /n, ŋ/.


----------

