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Russian distinguishes hard (unpalatalized or plain) and soft (palatalized) consonants (both phonetically and orthographically). Soft consonants, most of which are denoted by a superscript ʲ , are pronounced with the body of the tongue raised toward the hard palate , like the articulation of the y sound in yes .
Ъ used to be a very common letter in the Russian alphabet. This is because before the 1918 reform, any word ending with a non-palatalized consonant was written with a final Ъ — e.g., pre-1918 вотъ vs. post-reform вот. The reform eliminated the use of Ъ in this context, leaving it the least common letter in the Russian alphabet.
This is because the names of the letters, numbers, and symbols can be spelled out in normal English orthography in a way that makes the pronunciation unambiguous across dialects. For example, Dead on arrival (DOA) may be better explained as "(an initialism: D-O-A )" rather than as the equally correct but less accessible / ˌ d iː ˌ oʊ ˈ eɪ / .
The Russian spelling alphabet at right (PDF) The Russian spelling alphabet is a spelling alphabet (or "phonetic alphabet") for Russian, i.e. a set of names given to the alphabet letters for the purpose of unambiguous verbal spelling. It is used primarily by the Russian army, navy and the police.
Speakers may also have difficulty with the Russian vowel reduction system as well as other allophonic vowels. Tendency to reverse the distribution of [ɐ] and [ə]. English speakers tend to pronounce [ə] in the pretonic position, right where [ɐ] is required in Russian, while they pronounce [ɐ] in pre-pretonic positions, where [ə] occurs.
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. [note 7] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed.
English-speaking learners of Russian are often instructed to pronounce it in this way although it is no longer the standard pronunciation in Russian (it still is in Ukrainian and Rusyn, as above). The letter Щ in Russian and Ukrainian corresponds to ШЧ in related words in Belarusian.
This section describes the pronunciation in Russian and Belarusian. Other languages may have subtle differences. The letter ё is a stressed syllable in the overwhelming majority of Russian and Belarusian words. In Russian, unstressed ё occurs only in compound numerals and a few derived terms, wherein it is considered an exception.