Talk:Belarusian phonology

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This IPA table is crap! Acc to Padluzhny, 1979, belarusan has NO glottal fricatives. When yer put any competentive source for opposite, you'll return that table.

Your personal opinion is not a reason to do what you've done. Unomano 20:41, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Seconded. It would be much better to just blank out the questionable entries. This table wasn't all "crap". I wasn't able to find any academic source for the IPA equivalence, but initially there were some fairly reasonable, "no-alternative" guesses in this table. Later it got "developed" from the Omniglot, which is completely no reliable source in that matter. Yury Tarasievich 06:00, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Mostly to Unomano: it would be better to have not only the IPA form of the articulation table, but also the old form of the table, which quoted the translated Belarusian phonological definitions of the phonemes. That was there for a good reason. Yury Tarasievich 06:03, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bilabial fricative?

Something is wrong here and I'm not sure how to fix it. Short U cites Беларуская мова in saying that Belarusian has a bilabial fricative (represented by <ў>). If it is, instead, a /w/ after a vowel (as short U also seems to be saying, which then makes it contradict itself), then it seems very much like /w/ is an allophone of /u/ after a vowel (/w/, by the way, is generally considered rounded velar, not bilabial). Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 00:36, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

The Short U in Belarusian denotes the sonorant bilabial fricative consonant (Belarusian: санорны губны фрыкатыўны зычны), which evolved in Mediaeval out of V and velar L after the vowels (Padluzhny, Stsyatsko).

The assertion on its equivalence with English phoneme wasn't mine; e.g. the text on reverse approximation (English->Belarusian transcription; in Academy's Belarusian Linguistics, Vol.52, 2002) talks about approximate equivalence of English W and Belarusian Short U and V (which isn't articulated same as the as Russian V)

In fact, I've no idea how to write this in IPA, and that's why I asked for help with this long before. What user:Unomano bases his classification on, I don't know and he/she won't tell. Help of linguist knowing both phonetic classifications would be welcome. Yury Tarasievich 11:13, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

The thing about a sonorant bilabial fricative is that it's self-contradictory. According to sonorant, it is frictionless but a fricative, by definition, produces some frication. If it's just a bilabial fricative it would be [β] but I have a strong feeling that it is actually non-vocalic /u/ in the syllable coda. There was a debate at Talk:Short U about the exact character of this sound and it was never described as a bilabial fricative (or even bilabial for that matter). User:Kwamikagami might have some sources and insight on the matter. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 11:43, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Then sonorant (consonant) just isn't the right translation for the term "санорны". It's defined in Belarusian (East Slavonic?) linguistics as being considerably voiced, so not voiceless, but no so much as to be classified as voiced. Bilabial and fricative are the academic classification of it — Padluzhny, Phonetics of the Belarusian literary language, 1981. Yury Tarasievich 11:53, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

I think the translation is correct but the source you're citing is too vague to be helpful in our situation. /w/ has been described as bilabial and it's been described as a fricative but these are both incorrect most of the time and are only described as such for simplicity since languages tend to not contrast fricatives and homorganic approximants and /w/ is usually the only labiovelar sound in a language. Does Padluzhny use IPA? Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 18:52, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, the monographs of Padluzhny rather are not "vague" but *the* source on the phonetics (esp. instrumental) and phonology of Belarusian language. :))

The big problem here is that the classification of the articulation in East Slavonic linguistics scientific schools seems to be conducted slightly different than in the West. Also, the scientific lingo seems to be not term-to-term compatible.

E.g., the *approximate* ubiquituous classification of the "U short" phoneme is "sonorant bilabial fricative".

The articulative-physiological characteristic of same is "sonorant oral glide (плаўны), labial hard" (by the active artic. organ) and "sonorant glide, bilabial hard" (by the passive artic. organ).

The two variants of "J" are "noise-only (voiceless?) fricative voiced?(звонкі) middle-tongue" and "sonorant oral glide, middle-tongue" (by the act. art. organ) and these are merged into one "sonorant glide, front-palatal (alveolar?) palatalised" by the passive art. organ. Everything per the classif. tables in Padluzhny, p.61.

However, I suspect that what's called "санорны" shouldn't be translated as "sonorant" but as "voiced", and that's "звонкі" that'd be translated as "sonorant".

Padluzhny uses IPA just once, providing the table of correspondence between the symbols of Belarusian phonetic transcription and IPA. Symbols of IPA are corrupted in print (approximated by other Cyrillic, Latin, Greek graphemes), however. I could mail the scan to you if need be.Yury Tarasievich 08:19, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that you need to mail it to me. If he uses <w> as the IPA correspondance, then I think that the classification differences between the two schools can be glossed over for the purpose of our understanding. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 16:46, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wrong cells

Why do /l/ and /w/ are put into /ɹ/ and /ɰ/ cells (see IPA table) ? Unomano 20:24, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

/l/ and /w/ are approximants. /l/ is a lateral approximant, meaning air flows on the side of the tongue and /w/ has simultaneous lip rounding. In either case this is non-contrastive so extra rows or columns aren't necessary. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 21:08, 27 October 2007 (UTC)