One of the most difficult sections for pupils and students in the Russian language is phonetics. Quite often, students make mistakes in the phonetic analysis of words, the characterization of certain sounds, phonemes. But in many ways, knowledge of phonetics is the key to competent and cultural speech. Therefore, a lot of attention should be paid to such an issue as sounds. Today we are interested in vowel sounds. The letters that they denote will also be considered in our article. We will not ignore the general characteristics of the sound system of our language.
Sounds or letters?
To begin with, we will deal with what exactly we will describe in this article. It is worth noting that many people believe that in Russian there are consonants and vowels. Many are even willing to argue and will defend their case with foam at the mouth. But is it?
In fact, in the Russian language, only sounds lend themselves to such a classification. The letters serve only as a graphic designation of a particular phoneme or even a combination of phonemes, and also indicate the peculiarity of the pronunciation of a sound. Therefore, one cannot say that letters are vowels or consonants, stressed or unstressed.
General information
We proceed directly to the characterization of vowel phonemes. In the Russian language, there are six vowels, which in turn are indicated by ten “vowels”. When these sounds are formed, an air stream escapes from the oral cavity, which does not encounter any obstacles in its path. Thus, vowels consist only of a voice. Unlike consonants, they can be extended or sung. These sounds include: [a], [o], [y], [e], [u], [s].
Vowels have the following basic characteristics: row, up, shock or unstressed position. In addition, one can distinguish such a specific characteristic as labialization.
It is also worth noting that vowel sounds are the syllabic. Remember how in elementary school, children are taught to identify syllables in a word by counting vowels "letters".
Sound is the smallest part of speech, which not only serves as a material for the formation of words, but also helps to distinguish words with similar sound composition (for example, “foxes” and “forest” differ in only one vowel). A science such as phonetics studies vowels and consonants .
Let's now analyze each of the mentioned characteristics.
Shock and shocklessness
Let's start with the simplest and most important, in terms of speech culture, characteristics. Each vowel can be stressed or unstressed. A vowel sound in an unstressed position sounds less clear than in a shock. As for writing, then, regardless of position, they are denoted by the same letters. Letter vowels can be distinguished by the accent mark above the letter. Often such a designation is used in rare, rarely used, as well as dialect words.
It is also worth noting that unstressed vowels sound less clear and can act as another phoneme when transcribed. So, the unstressed vowel “o” can sound like “a”, and “and” can sound like “e” in the speech stream, in addition, sometimes a vowel can disappear altogether. In this case, the transcription will differ from the usual recording of the word.
For example, the word "milk" in phonetic transcription may look like this:
1. [malak'o] - transcription in the framework of the school curriculum.
2. [malak'o] - such a transcription is often used in higher educational institutions at the philological faculties. The sign "b" means that the sound "a" pronounces very briefly, practically drops out of the word when pronouncing.
Note that one of the difficulties of the Russian language is precisely unstressed vowels. The letters denoting them in the letter are not always similar to the audible sound, which causes a lot of errors. If you doubt the spelling of a particular word, use the spelling dictionary or check the spelling of the word using the rules you know.
Labialization
In the Russian language there are so-called labialized sounds - “o” and “u”. In some manuals, they may also be called ruined. Their feature is that when they are pronounced, lips participate, stretching forward. The remaining vowels of the Russian language do not have this feature.
Letters denoting vowel sounds that have this attribute are recorded in transcription in the same way as ordinary sounds.
Row
In the Russian language, three rows are distinguished according to the position of the tongue in the mouth when pronouncing the sound: front, middle and back.
If the main part of the tongue, when pronouncing the sound, is in the back of the oral cavity, then it (sound) belongs to the back row. The front row is characterized by the fact that when pronouncing the vowels related to it, the main part of the tongue is in the front. In the event that the pronunciation is intermediate, the sound refers to the middle vowels.
To which row are these or those sounds in the Russian language?
[o], [y] - the back row;
[a], [s] - average;
[and], [e] - front.
As you can see, these characteristics are quite simple, the main thing is to remember them. Given that there are not many vowels in the Russian language, memorizing this classification will not be difficult.
Raising
There is also another characteristic of vowels according to the position of the language during pronunciation. Here, as in the classification by series, there are three types of sounds: low, medium and high uplift.
This characteristic takes into account the position of the tongue in relation to the palate. If the pronunciation of the language is as close as possible to it, then the sound refers to the vowels of the upper raising, if it is located in the most remote position from the palate, then the lower one. If the tongue is in an intermediate position, it refers to the vowels of the middle rise.
Let us determine to which uplift the vowels of the Russian language belong:
[a] - lower;
[e], [o] - average;
[and], [s], [y] - top.
This characteristic and classification can also be quite easily remembered.
Matching sounds and letters
As already mentioned, there are only six vowels, but in the letter they are indicated by ten letters. Let's discuss what letters of vowels exist in Russian.
Sound [a] can transmit the following letters: "a", "I" (phonetically [ya]). Regarding the phoneme [o], it is indicated on the letter as “o” and “e” (phonetically [yo]). The labialized [y] can also convey the two letters “y” and “y” (phonetically [y]]. The same can be said about the sound [e]: it can be denoted by the letters "e" and "e" (phonetically [ye]).
The remaining two sounds [and] and [s] are denoted by just one letter - “and” and “s”, respectively. That's all the so-called vowels: a, o, y, i, e, u, e, e, u, s.
Transcription Procedure
Many schoolchildren, and university students too, have to deal with such a task as transcribing words. Consider the algorithm, focusing on the characterization of vowels.
The order of execution of tasks of this type is as follows:
1. We write down the word in the form in which it was given to you.
2. Next, you should definitely find out which letters are vowels, and which of them is stressed. That is, you need to put emphasis.
3. Divide the word into syllables. In this we can all the same vowel sounds.
4. We write down the phonetic transcription of the word, taking into account the position of both vowels and consonants in the word, their variants (for example, in unstressed position [o] may sound like [a]).
5. We write in a column all the letters.
6. We determine which sound or sound counting means one letter or another, and write this data in the opposite column.
7. We describe the characteristics of sound. Here we will not dwell on the characteristic of consonants, we will only focus on vowels. In the school tradition, only the position of the sound relative to the stress (shock or unstressed) is indicated. In universities, at the philological faculties, a number and uplift are additionally indicated, as well as the presence of sound labialization.
8. The last step is to count the number of letters and sounds in the analyzed word.
As you can see, nothing complicated. When in doubt about transcription, it can always be checked with the help of an orthoepic dictionary.
conclusions
In the Russian language, there are six sounds to which ten letters of the alphabet correspond to in a letter. These sounds, like other phonemes, are the building blocks of lexical units. It is thanks to sounds that we distinguish words, because changing even one sound can completely change their meaning and turn into completely different tokens.
So, we learned what “letters” are vowels: shock and unstressed, labialized. We found out that each vowel has such characteristics as row and uplift, learned to do phonetic transcription. In addition, they found out what science studies vowel sounds.
We hope this material will be useful not only to schoolchildren, but also to students of philological faculties.