Talk:Romanization of Ukrainian

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article falls within the scope of WikiProject Writing systems, a WikiProject interested in improving the encyclopaedic coverage and content of articles relating to writing systems on Wikipedia. If you would like to help out, you are welcome to drop by the project page and/or leave a query at the project’s talk page.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the Project’s quality scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as mid-importance on the Project’s importance scale.

Ukraine Portal

This page is within the scope of WikiProject Ukraine. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks.

This article has been rated as B-Class on the Project's quality scale.
(comments)

1 SMS romanization
2 International Scholarly system
3 Representation of Vowels in IPA
4 Recent IPA edits
5 Cyrillic in Wikipedia

[edit] SMS romanization

Is "SMS" an actual romanization standard that's codified somewhere, or just a suggested informal system like Volapuk encoding? —Michael Z. 2005-05-19 17:48 Z

[edit] International Scholarly system

The article now states: "Representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires Unicode."

Is Unicode really needed or will ISO Latin-9 do? -- Petri Krohn 04:03, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

After a quick look it appears that Latin-9 is missing the c-caron.[1] I think Latin-2, Latin-4 (North European,) and Latin-7 (Baltic Rim) should work. —Michael Z. 2005-10-12 05:54 Z

[edit] Representation of Vowels in IPA

[2] claims the Ukrainian vowels are ɛ, and ɑ, and ʊ; and not e, and ʌ, and u like in the article. -Iopq 00:39, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

I think all the IPA in the table is the same as in Daniels and Bright (eds.) The World's Writing Systems, page 702. ISBN 0195079930. I'm not 100% clear on the precise nuance of the IPA symbols, but I think all of the above may be well within the range of variation of regional Ukrainian accents. —Michael Z. 2005-10-17 03:15 Z

Just checked; WWS uses [a], [e], and [u]. I realize there's a slight discrepancy between this table and the one at Ukrainian alphabet. —Michael Z. 2005-10-17 03:21 Z

There's also the issue of phonetic vs. phonemic transcription. You'll notice in the table on the last page of the PDF, the same letter is pronounced differently in different places. I think this is a very precise phonetic transcription that captures all the nuances. The alphabet tables merely present the "generic" phonemic pronunciation of each letter. Don't know if this has any direct bearing on your question, though. —Michael Z. 2005-10-17 03:48 Z

The table makes the point that those pronunciations are the generally accepted pronunciations of the letter and the ones given in this table are the VARIATIONS in certain positions. I am not an expert on vowels, but I could imagine that the vowels sound like that in ISOLATION, but sometimes sound like in this table in certain words. I saw in another book a phonetic transcription with over a dozen vowel sounds because of all the dialects. But the IPA transcription SHOULD probably use the sound in isolation when simplifying. -Iopq 23:52, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. I have no idea which transcription is better, so I'll trust your judgement if you decide to change it. I also have a longish article on Ukrainian dialects in my Encyclopedia of Ukraine. I'll have a look at that and see if there's any more insight (I'm not even sure it uses IPA). —Michael Z. 2005-10-18 00:00 Z

Check out Bulgarian_language it has the same IPA for some of the vowels. The reason one doesn't match is because it's pronounced differently :)

I'm actually going to go to the library and check out a 1930 book on Ukranian phonology -Iopq 00:14, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I am looking at "A Phonetic Description of the Ukrainian Language" by Ivan Zilyns'kyj. The vowels are u i ɪ ɑ ɛ and the o is between ɔ and o. That's their isolated pronunciations. What's the correct way to list this reference? I'm going to edit the article as well as a whole bunch of Wikipedia articles that got this wrong :D. I'll leave o as just o. But I'm definitely going to change a and e.

A brief survey of the different interpretations, with references, could be useful in Ukrainian language#Phonetics. —Michael Z. 2005-10-18 17:34 Z PS: if you haven't seen it yet, please review my recent addition to Ukrainian alphabet.

The number of phonemes is arguable, but many seem to agree on 38 phonemes in view that the palatalized versions of some letters are always before an i so they are in fact allophones to their hard counterparts. I think I'll look around for different opinions on the vowels and listen to the vowel sounds on wikipedia. -Iopq 20:04, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Recent IPA edits

I have a couple of comments about the recent changes to IPA in this article. Please be patient with me if I misunderstood anything; I'm no linguist.

First of all, I must say that when I edited the IPA representation I didn't realize that there is already a discussion about this going on. So I just edited the table in a way I thought correct instead of proposing these changes in the discussion first. --Daniel Bunčić 22:44, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

The apostrophe (’)—isn't the apostrophe always followed by a sound like [ja], [je], [ji], [ju]? The apostrophe's function is to prevent that sound from palatalizing the previous letter (eg, prevent [ja] from becoming [ʲa], etc), so it doesn't actually have its own intrinsic phonetic value [j].

This is the traditional way the apostrophe (just as the 'hard sign' in Russian) is described. I doubt that this is true. If a consonant is followed by [j], it is certain to be palatalized (or at least 'semi-palatalized') in any language in the world. Try to pronounce a consonant before [j] without altering the usual tongue position the consonant would have in another position. You won't manage. So phonetically the consonants before the apostrophe are not hard. And phonologically, this is a neutral position, so it doesn't matter if they are hard or soft. What does the apostrophe really do then? Its only function is to indicate that there has to be a [j] between the consonant before it and the vowel after it. Consequently, instead of defining that <я> and <ю> are usually pronounced [a] and [u], but [ja] and [ju] after an apostrophe, it is much more elegant to say that <я> and <ю> are pronounced [a] and [u] and <’> is pronounced [j]. It gives the same result but needs less rules and exceptions. (NB. Yes, <я> and <ю> are pronounced [ja] and [ju] word-initially, too. But note that the set of vowel letters that are pronounced with a [j] in word-initial position is different.)

I know that an encyclopedia is not the place to put original research. But although I don't remember to have read this, I am not the only one to analyze the function of the apostrophe this way, and besides, the aim of an encyclopedia article on the Ukrainian writing system is to explain non-Ukrainians how it works, so the easiest way to do this should be the best one. --Daniel Bunčić 22:44, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Palatalization—is it necessary to show consonants in both normal and palatalized forms (e.g. [d] and [dʲ])? I think the [ʲ] is always added because of what follows the consonant letter (e.g., ь=[ʲ], or я=[ʲa]). Alternately, if we consider that [d] becomes [dʲ], then the vowels can be shown as e.g., only [ja] and not also [ʲa].

The problem is that this would imply that <я> is pronounced [ʲa], but [ʲa] is not a sound. This is a misconception that teachers of East Slavic languages have to spend a lot of time on to get it out of their students’ heads. Beginners often think of <я> as a letter for [ja] and consequently pronounce Надя/Nadja as ['nadja]. So it would really be better to say clearly that the regular pronunciation of <я> is [a]. --Daniel Bunčić 22:44, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Semi-palatalization—can we simplify the table by leaving out the semi-palatalized consonants (bʲ, vʲ, ɦʲ, gʲ, ʒʲ, kʲ, mʲ, pʲ, rʲ, fʲ, xʲ, ʧʲ, ʃʲ, ʃʧʲ) which I don't think are phonemic in Ukrainian, and aren't indicated in the orthography? Most articles about Ukrainian only describe palatalization in dʲ, zʲ, lʲ, nʲ, sʲ, tʲ, ʦʲ, ʣʲ. I'm a Ukrainian-speaker, but the existence of those semi-palatals has always been totally confusing to me.

These semi-palatals are confusing to me, too. Coming to Ukrainian from Russian, I have not really heard any phonetic difference. Of course the semi-palatals are different from their 'fully palatal' Russian counterparts phonologically, as they are not separate phonemes. But their pronunciation seems to me completely identical. --Daniel Bunčić 22:44, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

буряк is an example where rʲ is phonemic and indicated in the orthography and you can see it's different from бур'ян where it's hard -Iopq 03:39, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

I know it's different, but the difference is not the pronunciation of the <р>. My phonetic transcription would be буряк [bu'rʲak] vs. бур'ян [burʲ'jan]. (By the way, the two cannot be considered minimal pairs because the former consists of five sounds and the latter of six.)

I'm sorry I have to argue about such things with native speakers, myself having learned Ukrainian only as a foreign language. But contrary to common thought, native speakers are not natural experts at the linguistics of their language. (They are experts at their language, of course, but not at linguistics. Otherwise we would not need linguistic departments at all.) Which does not mean that I am necessarily right, of course. But phonetic reality is often contrary to intuition. An example from my language: Most speakers of German would claim they pronounce the word Hauptbahnhof 'railway station' with two [h]'s and a [t] in it (namely, [ˈhaʊptbaːnˌhoːf]), but in fact the normal pronunciation of this word is something like [ˈhaʊpːaˌnoːf]. --Daniel Bunčić 22:44, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

For clarity, a simpler table would be better. This article is about romanization in general, and IPA is already a side topic to the subject. If there are some finer points to be made about Ukrainian orthography, phonemics, and phonetics, they probably belong in the article about Ukrainian language. —Michael Z. 2005-12-1 00:59 Z

I completely agree, I already felt that the table is not really where it belongs when I edited it, since IPA is not really what one would consider romanization (especially as symbols like ɛɣʒʔ are not really roman letters). But I thought that at least it should be correct, and it can still be moved afterwords. --Daniel Bunčić 22:44, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

I suggest they belong in Ukrainian phonology -Iopq 03:40, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

No, IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet, it has nothing to do with phonology. (Well, almost nothing.) With a few comments on under which circumstances a letter is pronounced which way, one could introduce it in Ukrainian language. --Daniel Bunčić 22:44, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

P.S. Just seen that there already is a similar table at Ukrainian alphabet. Probably it would be best just to 'complicate' that one (as it is a bit simplistic) and then delete the IPA column in this article, with a link to Ukrainian alphabet for information on the original pronunciation of Ukrainian. So the table at Ukrainian alphabet would need an additional column with the scholarly transliteration in order to make it easier to compare that table with the transcription tables. --Daniel Bunčić 23:01, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Souds sensible to me. If there's no objection, I'd be glad to make most of the changes to the tables this weekend. —Michael Z. 2005-12-2 23:22 Z

I, for my part, don't object, and as I won't have time in the next days anyway: please do so. --Daniel Bunčić 10:27, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Done. Please check my edits of the tables here and at Ukrainian alphabet. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 19:22 Z

Thanks a lot, it looks very good. It's much better this way than as it used to be. One might consider giving more comments on palatalization and revising the comment on the apostrophe in the way I proposed above. The question is, should an encyclopedia really give all the information you need for the proper pronunciation of a language? On the other hand, once we have a table like this, it should probably tell the whole story. What do you think? --Daniel Bunčić 11:23, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I think Ukrainian alphabet should have enough phonology information to show how the alphabet works, and point to Ukrainian phonology, where the more detailed information belongs. The basic information also belongs at Ukrainian language#Phonetics. —Michael Z. 2005-12-6 16:21 Z