9

In Russian phonology there are [ʂ ʐ], while in Ukrainian phonology there are [ʃ ʒ]. The two sets sound quite identical phonetically, while the articulation positions of the two sets are different. So, do Russian/Ukrainian bilinguals or other speakers who daily switch between the two languages also switch between the sound pair [ʂ ʐ] and [ʃ ʒ], when they switch from the one language to the other? or does one individual usually have one fixed and stable pronunciation manner throughout their life? or could it become a free variation between the two sets?

And I think about, the two sounds sound quite similar on their own, while the identicality may be disillusioned by a following /i/.

wodemingzi
  • 1,057
  • 5
  • 9
  • 4
    As someone who is a native Russian speaker who knows Ukrainian I assure you that in both languages those sounds are indistinguishable in that sense that speaker is not making any effort, conscious or unconscious, to make the claimed distinction.

    The only difference is that in Ukrainian one can have palatalized version like шi / жi which is extremely hard to pronounce to Russian monolingual speaker but that's a slightly different story.

     – shabunc Dec 28 '20 at 22:40
  • The two sets certainly do not “sound quite identical phonetically” – they are clearly different. The fact that the two languages are closely related perhaps makes this harder to pick up on, but they are completely different sounds. Much like bilingual speakers of Mandarin and English normally consistently use [ʃ ʒ] when speaking English and [ʂ ʐ] when speaking Mandarin. Well, I say bilingual – this is of course true of people who aren’t bilingual as well. I didn’t learn Mandarin until I was about 20, and I still differentiate perfectly easily between the English and the Mandarin set. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 28 '20 at 23:27
  • Also, can you provide some evidence supporting the claim that in Russian it's indeed [ʂ ʐ] while in Ukrainian - exclusively [ʃ ʒ] – the thing is I do hear the difference in English/Mandarin mentioned by @janus-bahs-jacquet - I'm failing to hear the same drastic difference in it in Russian/Ukrainian. – shabunc Dec 29 '20 at 00:17
  • @JKlen difference between [ɕ] and [ʃ] is very obvious for speakers of languages where both phonemes are present. – shabunc Dec 29 '20 at 10:04
  • @JKlen some dialects of Ukrainian to start with. I also disagree with common definition of having a pair differing only in this particular phoneme as a required condition for telling apart phonemes. Even if there's no exact such match they are not necessarily allophonic - щастя and шастати sound very different. – shabunc Dec 29 '20 at 11:57
  • 2
    @JKlen again, in some dialects it's not ʃtʃ but ɕ – shabunc Dec 29 '20 at 13:19
  • @JKlen but why you think they can coexist? The very fact that some specific phoneme set is indistinguishable for me and/or extremely hard to pronounce properly doesn't mean it's difficult for someone. After it happens that [ɛ] and [ə] are allophonic - still for someone there's a clear difference. – shabunc Dec 29 '20 at 13:46
  • @JKlen I'm a strong believer that (two words with hamming distance =1) is an obsolete metric - we can have two following experiments - #1 check whether representative of specific group distinguish them #2 record how representative of specific group pronounce both phonemes.

    See, Southern Germans somehow indeed don't make distinction between voiced and voiceless fricative dentals - the abovementioned experiment will prove this very quickly. In my opinion this won't happen for some groups of Russian and Ukrainian speakers when it comes to [ɕ] / [ʃ] distinction.

     – shabunc Dec 29 '20 at 14:40
  • 1
    @shabunc I think you should add your initial comment as an answer too. Also, I once asked a Ukrainian about the difference between theirs and the Russian ш and the answer I got was "The pronunciation is the same in both languages", so my experience also confirms your answer. – MCCCS Dec 29 '20 at 19:12
  • 1
    @JKlen Danish has both: [ɕ] is the output form of /sj/, while /ʃ/ is a marginal phoneme found in (English) loan words – some people do merge them, but that’s true of a lot of distinct phonemes in a lot of languages. According to Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian has both hard and soft postalveolars, so both /ʃ/ and /ɕ/; and Tatar and Kabardic definitely have both as fully-fledged phonemes with different letters used to represent them. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 31 '20 at 11:55
  • @JKlen So essentially you’re doubting the phonemic status of /ʃ/ in any language at all. Even in English, it’s perfectly normal for /ʃ/ to be retracted a bit further by some speakers. As a native Danish speaker, I can assure you that the distinction is there, especially among younger speakers, even though I’m sure some speakers actually produce something closer to [ʂ] even there. I’m not aware of any language that distinguishes all of /s ɕ ʃ ʂ/, though I would not be surprised if such a language existed. To me, they are all easily distinguishable and clearly different. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 31 '20 at 12:53
  • 1
    @JKlen Well, I don’t think that’s true. Sure, there are slips that cause phonemes to get muddled up, but this is the case with all phonemes – that doesn’t make them less phonemic. I have no trouble distinguishing /ʃ ɕ/ in Danish or /ʂ ɕ/ in Mandarin, even in rapid speech, any more than I have trouble distinguishing /s z/ in English or /j ɥ/ in French or Mandarin. There are quite a few native speakers of Norwegian who distinguish [ɕ ʃ ʂ] as well, also in rapid speech, though [ç ʃ ʂ] is probably more common. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 31 '20 at 13:29

1 Answers1

9

TL;DR:
The difference between the two pairs is substantial.
Native speakers intuitively use phones so not to get trapped into the adjacent phoneme.

The differences between [ʃ ʒ] and [ʂ ʐ] are pretty much noticeable. To give you a taste, check this YouTube video. It is spoken mainly in Ukrainian, and there are several [ʃ], like in пішов ("went") (time tag 0:03, 0:12, 0:15, and so on). It also has Russian phrase at the end which contains шесть ("six") (time tag 2:04).

The Russian [ʂ ʐ] can stretch to its extreme. Normally, while the tongue is retracted, it is not curled backward, and the primary articulator is the front of the blade of the tongue. However, some speakers take it to extreme, their tongue is curled back so that the underside of the tongue acts as the primary articulator. Ludmila Berlinskaya is known for her extreme [ʂ ʐ]; check these two songs she performed: YouTube video one, two.
I'm not aware about such phenomenon in Ukrainian.

I don't have a corpus of words spoken in both languages, but check how Google Translate pronounces words like шишка, шашки, шершень ("cone, checkers, hornet") or жолудь, жарко ("oaknut, hot") in both languages. To me, the difference is evident, meaning that I can tell the language by hearing the sound.

Daresay, all Ukrainian Shibboleth words are based on fricatives and/or palatalized consonants.

It is also worth noting that Eastern dialects of Ukrainian underwent a heavy influence of forced russification, so many people — even bilingual speakers — would not see any difference between the phonemes in question.

Now we get to bilingual speakers.

We should keep in mind that people speak phones, not phonemes. A listener would "map" a phone they heard to a particular phoneme of the language. When we speak, our goal is not to produce an ideal phone; the only thing we need is to make sure that the listener mapped it the way we intended.

In both languages, phones undergo weakening, especially in rapid colloquial speech. You intuitively feel the margin where to stop.

In other words, when you speak Russian, in the range [ ɕ ʃ ʂ ], anything reasonably above the [ɕ] would be perceived as [ʂ], while in Ukrainian the same phone would map to [ʃ].
The same applies to the range of [ ʑ ʒ ʐ ].

Be Brave Be Like Ukraine
  • 8,629
  • 9
  • 38
  • 66