What Makes Russian Russian

October 11
What Makes Russian Russian

It was fate that made Moscow, and the Muscovite duchy, the center of the Great Russian lands, and the seat of the tsar “of all Russias,” царь всея Руси.” Here the Moscow colloquial speech of the seventeenth century became the standard for the written language of all of the land, and the characteristics of that very dialect, a variety of the central Rostovo-Suzdal’ dialect zone, became the standard for the future.

In phonology, that meant a very strong phonemic stress and concomitant loss of phonemic pitch and quantity. This trait is shared by nearly all dialects, from the Northeast and Moscow, to the Southwest and the Novgorod-Pskov dialects, to the Zavolzh’e variety. This latter, located in an intermediate zone between Great Russian and Belorussian, has a seven-vowel system with long tense vowels, a v like a w, and, most important, no reduction of unstressed vowels.

In Moscow, however, аканье was adopted from some neighboring speech communities, and that most natural of developments in the presence of a strong phonemic pitch led to a drastic reduction of the unstressed vocalism: three vowels only, in the first pretonic syllable. High unrounded vowels are represented by i, and mid flat vowels, by a. Moscow thus had [v’id’i], ведИ ‘lead!’, [vad’i], водИ ‘lead’ (indet.), [vadi] водЫ ‘water’ (gen. sg.). The spelling gives the etymologies rather better than the phonetics; listen to your teacher pronounce ведИ, водИ, водЫ. Although the vowels sound rather different, especially the mid-back jery in водЫ, they are completely driven and predicted by the consonants. This remains the greatest justification of considering и and ы to be varieties of the same phoneme, even though Russians, psychologically, feel the great phonetic disparity between the two. But they are one, functionally.

Moscow speech has that strong phonemic stress, plus a highly developed system of soft vs. hard consonants, perhaps the most remarkably pervasive such system in all the dialects of all the Slavic languages. Ukrainian and Belorussian have soft ~ hard, but not with such rigor and not in so many tiers and ranks, as does Russian; Polish soft consonants are not so much ‘palatalized’ in the Russian manner (e.g. dentals да–да, дядя, –ся, –си, –сю –сё vs. –са, –сы, –су, –со) as transformed into lisping-like palatal sounds.

Devoicing at word-final and in clusters is most insistent and thorough in the Moscow dialect, and is varyingly realized in languages with more sparsely realized palatalization oppositions. Ukrainian, for example, has voiced final consonants and tenseness, rather than voicing, as the basic obstruent feature.

It is a romantic notion that I am about to broach, but nonetheless I like it and want to keep it. The stress-system, the consonantal hegemony, and the simplicity of the vocalism of Moscow was perfectly tuned for the great poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, based, as it was for the most part, on very regular alternation of stresses in disyllabic and trisyllabic meters (vs. the relative freedom in English iambs, for example), and, later, in the dol’niki and free verse of contemporary poets, the continuing dominence of the stressed vowel.

There is nothing and no language like Russian for stress. Compare a Russian saying Guten Tag ‘good day!’ in German with the pronunciation of a German-speaking native. All stress, all voicing vowels and devoicing consonants— vs. the tense German consonants. Try it out.

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