Pronunciation Rules for Russian: A Systematic Approach for Converting Russian Spelling to Sound

2. From Standard Orthography to Regularized Orthography

2 From Standard Orthography to Regularized Orthography 2.0. The Standard Orthography of Russian The standard orthography (SO) of CSR is defined as the way in which the language is ordinarily represented in written form, as in books, magazines, newspapers, etc.. In other words, it is the familiar and traditional spelling system of the language, incorporating the major spelling reforms of 1917–18. The standard spelling of most Russian words in general use can be found in any good Russian-English or Russian-Russian dictionary. A useful supplementary work is a good orthographic and pronouncing dictionary such as OSRJa, which not only provides the standard spelling of an extremely wide range of words, but also notes irregularities in many inflected forms and provides additional hints as to idiosyncracies of pronunciation. There is one important difference which should be noted between the spelling provided in all of these standard reference works and the one found in ordinary reading material intended for native speakers. This is that the reference works ordinarily indicate the position of maximum stress (and, in compound words, secondary stress, as well), and also make the distinction between  and  (by the dieresis), contrary to normal practice elsewhere. This is a great convenience for reference purposes, but a luxury not required in ordinary reading material (cf. the parallel situation in English, where stress is always indicated in dictionaries, but almost never anywhere else). Since information about Russian stress and the dieresis is readily accessible to all students in the standard reference works, we shall construe the term “standard orthography” to refer to the standard spelling with both stress and the dieresis supplied.1 It is also important to make a clear distinction between the standard orthography or spelling of a word (the traditionally used letters) and a phonetic transcription (a symbolic representation of a sequence of speech sounds—or phones—which are articulated by a speaker when a 1 Remember that  will always receive either primary or secondary stress. 14 2. FROM SO TO RO word or utterance is actually pronounced, whether spontaneously or in reading aloud). It should first of all be recognized that the letters of the standard orthography are not actually “pronounced” (at least not by most speakers). There can be no doubt that any alphabetic writing system (such as Cyrillic) exerts a considerable influence on the actual pronunciation of words over a period of time;2 nonetheless, the typical acquisition sequence remains one in which native speakers learn to pronounce most of the words of their language (and especially the most common words) some time before they ever learn how they are spelled. Furthermore, variations in pronunciation, whether stylistic or dialectal, are, for obvious reasons, much more readily tolerated than are variations in spelling. Consequently, we can expect that the writing system of any language will provide only a rather crude and imperfect indication of how words are actually pronounced, even under the best of circumstances. In other words, no spelling systems are absolutely “phonetic,” or are intended to be. Nevertheless, in all languages which employ alphabetic writing, a fairly close relationship ordinarily exists between the spelling of a word and its pronunciation, although this relationship is often rather abstract and indirect, and usually manifests a good deal of inconsistency and irregularity, as well. Still, although one must often resort to long lists of “irregularities” in order to make the prediction complete, it is generally possible to determine the pronunciation of a word whose (alphabetic) written form is known (though often not the reverse). If this were not so, a set of “pronunciation rules” of the kind developed and presented here would, of course, be impossible. Our purpose, therefore, is to take advantage of those systematic correspondences which do exist between the spelling and pronunciation of Russian words. To distinguish the SO from all other levels of representation employed in this book, it will be supplied throughout in SMALL CAPS. The regularized orthography is discussed in 2.4. below. 2.1. A Preliminary Classification of the Russian Letters In this section the letters of the Russian alphabet are grouped into classes to which repeated reference will be made on the pages to follow. For convenience, most of the terms used to name these classes are 2 See section 5.4. on this topic. 2.1. A PRELIMINARY CLASSIFICATION OF THE RUSSIAN LETTERS 15 borrowed from articulatory phonetics, but readers should not be confused on...