 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
This article deals with the phonology of the standard Ukrainian language.
| This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
This article deals with the phonology of the standard Ukrainian language.
Stress is phonemic in Ukrainian. With most Ukrainian nouns, the stress falls on either the final vowel of the stem or the initial vowel of the inflection. In a few nouns the stress may be further forward.[ clarification needed ] The position is generally fixed for the various cases of the noun (though inflection stress shifts to the last vowel of the stem if the inflection is a zero suffix), but may change with number (stem stress in both singular and plural, e.g. теа́тр ~ теа́три 'theater'; stem stress in the singular and inflection stress in the plural, e.g. жі́нка ~ жінки́ 'woman'; and so on for all permutations.)
The pattern with adjectives is similar to that of nouns, but does not differ between singular and plural (all stem stress or all inflection stress). In some inflection-stressed adjectives, stress shifts to the stem in the comparative.
With most verbs, stress falls on a syllable in the stem. That syllable may differ between the perfective and imperfective aspects (verbs with 'shifting stress'), but otherwise the stress remains on the same syllable for all inflections. A small group of verbs which do not shift for aspect and have е in their stems bear stress on the inflection. That stress is always on the last syllable of the word apart from in the future imperfective, where it is on the same syllable as in the infinitive (INF нести́, FUT.NPFV.3sg нести́ме 'carry').
With numerals, stress placement may differ between ordinal and cardinal forms.
For names, stress may shift between given names (Богда́н, Рома́н) and family names (Бо́гдан, Ро́ман), and between patronymics (Іва́нович, Богда́нович) and family names (Івано́вич, Богдано́вич).
Ukrainian has the six monophthong phonemes shown below. /ɪ/ is a retracted close-mid front vowel [ ɪ̞ ]. [1]
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | ɪ | u |
| Mid | ɛ | ɔ | |
| Open | a |
Ukrainian has no phonemic distinction between long and short vowels; however, unstressed vowels are shorter and tend to be more centralized. [2] The unstressed vowel allophones are as follows: [3]
| Labial | Dental/Alveolar | Post- alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hard | Soft | ||||||
| Nasal | m | n | nʲ | ||||
| Stop | p b | t d | tʲ dʲ | k ɡ | |||
| Affricate | t͡s d͡z | t͡sʲ d͡zʲ | t͡ʃ d͡ʒ | ||||
| Fricative | f | s z | sʲ zʲ | ʃ ʒ | x | ɦ | |
| Approximant | ʋ ~ w | l | lʲ | j | |||
| Trill | r | rʲ | |||||
In the table above, whenever two consonants share a cell, the one to the left is voiceless, while the one to the right is voiced.
Phonetic details:
When two or more consonants occur word-finally, a vowel is epenthesized under the following conditions: [18] Given a consonantal grouping C1(ь)C2(ь), ‘C’ being any consonant, the vowel is inserted between the two consonants and after the ь. A vowel is not inserted unless C2 is /k/, /w/, /l/, /m/, /r/, or /t͡s/. Then:
The semivowels /j/ and /w/ alternate with the vowels /i/ and /u/ respectively. The semivowels are used in syllable codas: after a vowel and before a consonant, either within a word or between words:[ citation needed ]
This feature distinguishes Ukrainian phonology from Russian and Polish, two related languages with many cognates.
Ukrainian has assimilatory voicing: voiceless obstruents are voiced when preceding voiced obstruents. [19] (Voiced sonorants do not trigger voicing.)
There is no such assimilation in the reverse direction (voicing of voiceless obstruents following voiced obstruents). [19]
With a few exceptions, there is no word-final or assimilatory devoicing in Ukrainian. The exceptions are легко, вогко, нігті, кігті, дьогтю, дігтяр, and their derivatives: /ɦ/ may then be devoiced to [ h ] or even merge with /x/. [11]
Unpalatalized dental consonants /n,t,d,t͡s,d͡z,s,z,r,l/ become palatalized if they are followed by other palatalized dental consonants /nʲ,tʲ,dʲ,t͡sʲ,d͡zʲ,sʲ,zʲ,rʲ,lʲ/. They are also typically palatalized before the vowel /i/. Historically, contrasting unpalatalized and palatalized articulations of consonants before /i/ were possible and more common, with the absence of palatalization usually reflecting that regular sound changes in the language made an /i/ vowel actually evolve from an older, non-palatalizing /ɔ/ vowel. Ukrainian grammar still allows for /i/ to alternate with either /ɛ/ or /ɔ/ in the regular inflection of certain words. The absence of consonant palatalization before /i/ has become rare, however, but is still allowed when the і succeeding a consonant originated from older о, evidenced by о preserved in some word forms such as стіл / стола ("table", N sg./G sg.). [11]
While the labial consonants /m,p,b,f,w/ cannot be phonemically palatalized, they can still precede one of the iotating vowels є і ьо ю я, when many speakers replace the would-be sequences *|mʲ,pʲ,bʲ,fʲ,wʲ| with the consonant clusters /mj,pj,bj,fj,wj/, a habit also common in nearby Polish. [11] The separation of labial consonants from /j/ is already hard-coded in many Ukrainian words (and written as such with an apostrophe), such as in В'ячеслав/wjat͡ʃɛˈslaw/ "Vyacheslav", ім'я /iˈmja/ "name" and п'ять /pjatʲ/ "five".[ citation needed ] The combinations of labials with iotating vowels are written without the apostrophe after consonants in the same morpheme, e.g. свято/ˈsʲw(j)atɔ/ "holiday", цвях "nail" (but зв'язок "union", where з- is a prefix), and in some loanwords, e. g. бюро "bureau".
Dental sibilant consonants /t͡s,d͡z,s,z/ become palatalized before any of the labial consonants /m,p,b,f,w/ followed by one of the iotating vowels є і ьо ю я, but the labial consonants themselves cannot retain phonemic palatalization. Thus, words like свято/ˈsʲw(j)atɔ/ "holiday" and сват/swat/ "matchmaker" retain their separate pronunciations (whether or not an actual /j/ is articulated). [11]
Sibilant consonants (including affricates) in clusters assimilate with the place of articulation and palatalization state of the last segment in a cluster. The most common case of such assimilation is the verbal ending -шся in which |ʃsʲa| assimilates into /sʲːa/. [11]
Dental plosives /t,tʲ,d,dʲ/ assimilate to affricate articulations before coronal affricates or fricatives /t͡s,d͡z,s,z,t͡sʲ,d͡zʲ,sʲ,zʲ,t͡ʃ,d͡ʒ,ʃ,ʒ/ and assume the latter consonant's place of articulation and palatalization. If the sequences |t.t͡s,d.d͡z,t.t͡sʲ,d.d͡zʲ,t.t͡ʃ,d.d͡ʒ| regressively assimilate to */t͡s.t͡s,d͡z.d͡z,t͡sʲ.t͡sʲ,d͡zʲ.d͡zʲ,t͡ʃ.t͡ʃ,d͡ʒ.d͡ʒ/, they gain geminate articulations /t͡sː,d͡zː,t͡sʲː,d͡zʲː,t͡ʃː,d͡ʒː/. [11]
There are some typical deviations which may appear in spoken language (often under the influence of Russian). [20] They are usually considered phonetic errors by pedagogists. [21]
Modern standard Ukrainian descends from Common Slavic and is characterized by a number of sound changes and morphological developments, many of which are shared with other East Slavic languages. These include:
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation. It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and, often spelled ch and j, respectively.
Upper Sorbian, occasionally referred to as Wendish, is a minority language spoken by Sorbs, in the historical province of Upper Lusatia, which is today part of Saxony, Germany. It is grouped in the West Slavic language branch, together with Lower Sorbian, Czech, Polish, Silesian, Slovak, and Kashubian.
The phonology of Catalan, a Romance language, has a certain degree of dialectal variation. Although there are two standard varieties, one based on Central Eastern dialect and another one based on South-Western or Valencian dialect, this article deals with features of all or most dialects, as well as regional pronunciation differences.
The phonology of the Hungarian language is notable for its process of vowel harmony, the frequent occurrence of geminate consonants and the presence of otherwise uncommon palatal stops.
Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language designed to have a simple phonology. The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, described Esperanto pronunciation by comparing the sounds of Esperanto with the sounds of several major European languages.
The phonology of Japanese features a phonemic inventory including five vowels and 12 or more consonants. The phonotactics are relatively simple, allowing for few consonant clusters. Japanese phonology has been affected by the presence of several layers of vocabulary in the language: in addition to native Japanese vocabulary, Japanese has a large amount of Chinese-based vocabulary and loanwords from other languages.
The phonological system of the Polish language is similar in many ways to those of other Slavic languages, although there are some characteristic features found in only a few other languages of the family, such as contrasting postalveolar and alveolo-palatal fricatives and affricates. The vowel system is relatively simple, with just six oral monophthongs and arguably two nasals in traditional speech, while the consonant system is much more complex.
This article describes those aspects of the phonological history of English which concern consonants.
This article discusses the phonological system of the Czech language.
The phonology of the Zuni language as spoken in the southwestern United States is described here. Phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds.
The Cyrillic script family contains many specially treated two-letter combinations, or digraphs, but few of these are used in Slavic languages. In a few alphabets, trigraphs and even the occasional tetragraph or pentagraph are used.
The following list is a comparison of basic Proto-Slavic vocabulary and the corresponding reflexes in the modern languages, for assistance in understanding the discussion in Proto-Slavic and History of the Slavic languages. The word list is based on the Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist Morris Swadesh, a tool to study the evolution of languages via comparison, containing a set of 207 basic words which can be found in every language and are rarely borrowed. However, the words given as the modern versions are not necessarily the normal words with the given meaning in the various modern languages, but the words directly descended from the corresponding Proto-Slavic word. The list here is given both in the orthography of each language, with accent marks added as necessary to aid in pronunciation and Proto-Slavic reconstruction. See below for a capsule summary of how to pronounce each language, as well as some discussion of the conventions used.
Lithuanian has eleven vowels and 45 consonants, including 22 pairs of consonants distinguished by the presence or absence of palatalization. Most vowels come in pairs which are differentiated through length and degree of centralization.
This article discusses the phonological system of the Bulgarian language.
This article describes the phonology of the Occitan language.
Serbo-Croatian is a South Slavic language with four national standards. The Eastern Herzegovinian Neo-Shtokavian dialect forms the basis for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian.
This article discusses the phonological system of standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect. For an overview of dialects in the Russian language, see Russian dialects. Most descriptions of Russian describe it as having five vowel phonemes, though there is some dispute over whether a sixth vowel,, is separate from. Russian has 34 consonants, which can be divided into two types:
Adyghe is a language of the Northwest Caucasian family which, like the other Northwest Caucasian languages, is very rich in consonants, featuring many labialized and ejective consonants. Adyghe is phonologically more complex than Kabardian, having the retroflex consonants and their labialized forms.
As a member of the dialect continuum of Romance languages, Catalan displays linguistic features similar to those of its closest neighbors. The following features represent in some cases unique changes in the evolution of Catalan from Vulgar Latin; other features are common in other Romance-speaking areas.
Kerkrade dialect is a Ripuarian dialect spoken in Kerkrade and its surroundings, including Herzogenrath in Germany. It is spoken in all social classes, but the variety spoken by younger people in Kerkrade is somewhat closer to Standard Dutch.