Russian vowel transliteration

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by skaught, Apr 13, 2009.

  1. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    In order to make myself more familiar with Russian alphabet, I often take notes at work using russian letters. I just write out english words using cyrillic. But I am often stumped at which vowels to use in place of the english vowels, or various vowel sounds. There are only 5 vowels in english but about 11 vowel sounds, according to Fraggle:
    Main
    Lack
    Fawn
    Leak
    Men
    Lick
    Lock
    Phone
    look
    Luck
    Luke
    Im guessing fraggle is from somewhere different from me, cause here there is also:
    like
    Boy

    So yeah, any help would be appreciated.
     
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  3. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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  5. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    :frust:

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    Yeah been there, wasn't much help...
     
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  7. draqon Banned Banned

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    if I understand it correctly you want those words written in russian letters? english words written in russian letters? correct?

    if yes, here it is:

    мэйн
    лак
    фаувн (or...фавн)
    лийк
    мэн
    лик
    лак
    фон
    лук
    лакъ
    люк
    лайк
    бой
     
  8. Sputnik Banned Banned

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    888
    Ahemm .... dragon ..... no , I think Skaught is just trying to pronounce russian vowels , using examples .............
     
  9. draqon Banned Banned

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    oooo...I don get it than.
     
  10. Sputnik Banned Banned

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    888
    a ..... can be pronounced like a in main ....like æ
    a ......can be pronounced like a in lack ... flat a
    a ...... can be pronounced like a in fawn .... like å

    and so on ......

    Anyway , I speak and read russian as you know .... but I never studied speciel pronounciations of vowels ........ just learning the lingo by letting it flow into my ear ....
     
  11. Steve100 O͓͍̯̬̯̙͈̟̥̳̩͒̆̿ͬ̑̀̓̿͋ͬ ̙̳ͅ ̫̪̳͔O Valued Senior Member

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    What's the difference between "look" and "luck"?
     
  12. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    None in our language Steve (British English), unless you're a Geordie.
     
  13. draqon Banned Banned

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    look is spelled as "luk"
    luck is spelled as "lak"
     
  14. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    No draqon was right!

    Thanks Draqon, that was perfect!!!
     
  15. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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    I knew we kept old Draggy around for some reason.

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    Nice job D.
     
  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I wonder if there is a standard system for transliterating English into ANY foreign alphabet. Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Armenian, Cambodian...

    There are three major obstacles to this endeavor.

    1. English has arguably the world's LEAST phonetic writing system, among languages which actually use an alphabet rather than ideograms. French is just as bad but I've never encountered one that was worse. Therefore one wouldn't know where to start in attempting to find correspondence between one's own alphabet and ours. As Skaught points out, our vowels are a joke, with most having at least three common pronunciations. And each phoneme can be spelled in several different ways, such as the SH sound in fascism, nation, mission, shore, facial and panache. We have many silent letters (although not as many as French) and bizarre pairings like GH, which has more than one pronunciation but also falls silent and merely drastically affects the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. We freely adopt foreign words and retain both their spelling and some semblance of their pronunciation.

    2. English has one of the largest numbers of phonemes, which means that most other languages don't have ways of distinguishing them or even transcribing them at all, and most people can't easily hear the difference anyway. The vowels in cat, cot and cut (American pronunciation) sound the same to hundreds of millions of people. The TH in those and thought are two sounds that perhaps the majority of the people on earth have trouble saying, much less realizing that they're different.

    3. British and American dialect diverge tremendously in pronunciation, so there's no one standard for choosing a phonetic transcription. Would you try to transliterate "laboratory" labrutorry or luborrutree? In America "caught" has a Russian O and "cot" has a Russian A, but the British pronounce "cot" with the Russian O and "caught" has a sound that does not truly exist in Russian. The T in American "tomato" is a perfect Russian R, but in England it's a T sound that Russian doesn't have.
    Those are diphthongs (combinations of two vowels) so I didn't include them to avoid making the paradigm even more complicated.
    So far so good...
    No, I don't think you're familiar with this word ("fawn," a baby deer). It's pronounced фон, with the broad Russian O in America and a narrower O in England. The rest of your transliterations appear to represent the American pronunciations and I can assure you that any Brits reading this will be scratching their heads wondering how you could have gotten them so wrong. Even so you're having trouble distinguishing among our eleven vowels, not to mention the diphthongs.
    None in British dialect. In America look is IPA lʋk and luck is IPA lʌk. I think you say "look" about the same way we do. But our "luck" has the U in "unhappy," the O in "love" and "won," the OU in "rough." If you pronounce all of those vowels the same way as "look," then your dialect just doesn't have what we call a short U sound in America.
     
  17. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    I've just spent five minutes talking to myself and I think you have it reversed Fraggle: our look/ luck has the same "u" sound as love, won, cut, put.
    I'm STILL having trouble trouble trying to say luck as "lak"

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    That reminds me that as an engineering student no-one ever asked to borrow my class notes more than once because I had the habit of writing them in French, but with Cyrillic lettering as far as possible.

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  18. draqon Banned Banned

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    Why would he care about the british dialect of it? I agree with fawn by the way, it was really tough to pick which one to use there..."o" would be better.
     
  19. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    Why would who care?
     
  20. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    You're still compressing two of our phonemes into one of yours. Luck, love, won, cut, other, lunch versus look, put, could, bush.
    How do you say the U in unhappy? For us that's the U in luck. I get the impression you guys just don't have that phoneme.
     
  21. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    I couldn't be bothered to type "unhappy" but it's the same as luck/ love/ lunch/ put/ could/ cud etc. Sorry, my laziness.
     
  22. draqon Banned Banned

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    its not the same as put and could
     
  23. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    Not for you maybe.
    It is for British English.
     

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