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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.
/ʒ/ or /z̠/ (Iron dialect of Ossetian, but /z/ in Digoron and Kudairag); clusters зж and зш are pronounced in Russian as if they were жж and шш , respectively (even if з is the last letter of a preposition, like in Russian без жены "without wife" or из школы "from school");
This chart uses frequencies to represent the basic vowel triangle of the Russian language. Russian has five to six vowels in stressed syllables, /i, u, e, o, a/ and in some analyses /ɨ/, but in most cases these vowels have merged to only two to four vowels when unstressed: /i, u, a/ (or /ɨ, u, a/) after hard consonants and /i, u/ after soft ones.
It commonly represents the voiced retroflex sibilant /ʐ/ or voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, like the pronunciation of the s in "measure". It is also often used with D to approximate the sound in English of the Latin letter J with a ДЖ combination. Zhe is romanized as zh , j or ž .
Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, [ɑ] (the first vowel in father) is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. [i] (the vowel in "meet") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.
The z in the Spanish word chorizo is sometimes realized as / t s / by English speakers, reflecting more closely the pronunciation of the double letter zz in Italian and Italian loanwords in English. This is not the pronunciation of present-day Spanish, however. Rather, the z in chorizo represents or (depending on dialect) in Spanish.
In the pronunciation of the Russian language, several ways of vowel reduction (and its absence) are distinguished between the standard language and dialects. Russian orthography most often does not reflect vowel reduction, which can confuse foreign-language learners, but some spelling reforms have changed some words.
The Russian alphabet (ру́сский алфави́т, russkiy alfavit, [a] or ру́сская а́збука, russkaya azbuka, [b] more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language.