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This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Russian on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Russian in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
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.
Russian spelling, which is mostly phonemic in practice, is a mix of morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek , was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the models of French and German ...
In Russian, the letter has little use in loanwords and orthographic transcriptions of foreign words. A notable exception is the use of ля Russian pronunciation: to transcribe /la/, mostly from Romance languages, Polish, German and Arabic. This makes л to match better than its dark l pronunciation in ла .
Russian diphthongs all end in a non-syllabic [i̯], an allophone of /j/ and the only semivowel in Russian. In all contexts other than after a vowel, /j/ is considered an approximant consonant. Phonological descriptions of /j/ may also classify it as a consonant even in the coda. In such descriptions, Russian has no diphthongs.
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.
The ѳ remained more common, though it became quite rare as a "Western" (French-like) pronunciation had been adopted for many words; for example, ѳеатръ (ḟeatr, [fʲɪˈatr], 'theater') became театръ (teatr, [tʲɪˈatr]). In early Russian typewriters like this one, there was no key for the digit 1, so the dotted І was used instead.
Yakanye (яканье) is the pronunciation of unstressed /e/ and /a/ after palatalised consonants preceding a stressed syllable as /a/, rather than /i/ (несли́ is pronounced [nʲasˈlʲi], not [nʲɪsˈlʲi]). This pronunciation is observed in Belarusian and in most Southern Russian dialects, as is expressed in a quip (with liberal yakanye):