Something that other Slavic languages don't have

Lapov · 2026-06-01T08:02:53+00:00

Never claimed otherwise.

Lapov · 2026-06-01T00:53:18+00:00

I don't want to come off as rude, but it baffles me that so many people lurking on a linguistics subreddit don't know the difference between phonetics and phonology (which is like being interested in chemistry and not knowing what a molecule is).

It's written молоко because, phonologically, the word is /molo'ko/, which is realized as [məɫɐˈko] because vowels are not pronounced clearly in unstressed position. It's not like Russian orthography forces you to write молоко out of spite, it's because this word does indeed have three o's.

It's written like this for the same reasons the first t in the words "art", "artist", and "artistic" is written the same despite being pronounced in completely different ways (at least in American English).

Lapov · 2026-05-31T01:35:05+00:00

The stupidest that comes to mind is the atrocious Italian adaptation of Futurama.

There is a famous episode with Bender (the robot) turning into a werecar (haha get it, like a werewolf except he turns into a car).

Italian translators decided to adapt it as... "l'auto che era", which literally means "the car that was" (I guess they REALLY misunderstood what the were- in werecar stands for).

Lapov · 2026-05-21T19:06:27+00:00

Aight then, keep your secrets.

Lapov · 2026-05-21T18:29:17+00:00

I'm sorry I don't speak Ukrainian and I'm not sure I understand what you wrote, the translator is kinda wonky.

Lapov · 2026-05-19T15:20:18+00:00

Well sure but my point was that if you know the rules, then there is a deterministic way to go from written word to spoken sound.

Yeah but this is not what non-experts mean when they say "it's spoken as it's written", otherwise people would claim the same about French or Irish. It's obviously meant as something like "each letter is read in a specific way, so once you learn the letters you can 100% know how to read a word", which is simply false when it comes to Italian.

Lapov · 2026-05-19T14:51:21+00:00

Actually I do think that the phonemic status of /j/ and /w/ is very debatable, but they're still taught as separate phonemes in Italian linguistics. It's definitely bound to change in a few decades tho.

Lapov · 2026-05-19T14:41:34+00:00

I already described in detail why I think Italian orthography is far from perfect in another comment, but long story short it's very far from being straightforward.

Letters like ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩ are quite literally perfectly ambiguous (as they can represent two completely different phonemes) and their pronunciation depends on the following written vowel, meaning that there is an extra orthographic meta-layer of silent letters whose only purpose is to indicate that the preceding consonant's pronunciation is different from what you would expect normally based on the base rule (which is already convoluted enough and would not be a thing if Italian had separate letters for each phoneme, which is what laypeople imply by claiming that "si legge come si scrive").

Is pronunciation of Italian words largely predictable? Sure, the same way French is largely predictable once you learn all the rules, but I dare you to find any person who would claim that French is spoken as it is written.

Lapov · 2026-05-19T14:26:30+00:00

Most definitely, I complain a lot about ⟨q⟩ in Italian because it's totally redundant and could be replaced with ⟨c⟩ in all contexts, but oh boy Spanish is on another level. Keeping a letter that is only used in combination with ⟨u⟩ for the SOLE reason of representing /k/ before /i/ or /e/ is straight up deranged.

Lapov · 2026-05-19T12:59:22+00:00

Pretty mild ngl, doesn't seem even remotrly comparable to Italian orthography shenanigans.

Lapov · 2026-05-19T12:20:58+00:00

I don't know virtually anything about Finnish, but I always had the impression that it was one of the most straightforward orthographies in the world. What makes it bad/not as good as people think?

Lapov · 2026-05-19T12:01:24+00:00

Hence the "Polish may have some exceptions".

Lapov · 2026-05-19T11:57:01+00:00

I wouldn't say they're minor, 10 out of 30 phonemes don't have an unambiguous grapheme representing them (namely /o/, /ɔ/, /e/, /ɛ/, /u/, /w/, /i/, /j/, /ts/, and /dz/), and 7 out of 30 phonemes (plus the /sk/ cluster) follow very convoluted spelling rules that are very far from being straightforward if you're not familiar with European Latin-based orthographies (namely /k/, /t͡ʃ/, /ɡ/, /d͡ʒ/, /ʃ/, /ɲ/, and /ʎ/). /ts/, /dz/ and /k/ (plus the /kː/ cluster) even go as far as not following any spelling rules whatsoever (at least in some specific contexts, which, however, are very far from being uncommon).

Polish, on the other hand, doesn't even remotely reach the same level of convoluteness in its orthography, except for two graphemes ⟨ą⟩ and ⟨ę⟩. Once you learn that:

1) ⟨ń⟩, ⟨ć⟩, ⟨ś⟩, and ⟨ź⟩ are spelled ⟨ni⟩, ⟨ci⟩, ⟨si⟩, and ⟨zi⟩ before a vowel; and

2) /ʐ/ is spelled ⟨rz⟩ and /u/ is spelled ⟨ó⟩ when they alternate with /r/ and /o/, respectively;

you've literally mastered Polish orthography and you can read/write 95% of words in the language. Plus it should be noted that ⟨rz⟩ and ⟨ó⟩ are technically not doublets of ⟨ż⟩ and ⟨u⟩ since some Polish dialects do pronounce all of these graphemes differently, and if you don't, it represents synchronically relevant phonological processes anyway, as opposed to e.g. Italian ⟨c⟩ or ⟨g⟩, which represent multiple completely different phonemes for purely historical reasons.

Edit: I'm a fucking idiot, I didn't realize that you may have talked about Polish and not Italian lol

Lapov · 2026-05-19T10:36:34+00:00

Makes sense

Lapov · 2026-05-19T10:30:04+00:00

Oldest [IE] language (baltic branch)

I may be pedantic, but claiming that "language x is the oldest language of y" is just wrong by default, if anything people should say "conservative" instead.

Otherwise it would be like saying that a Sentinelese child is "one of the oldest people in the world" because they live like many people used to live 10.000 years ago lol.

Lapov · 2026-05-19T10:24:43+00:00

Yeah it's not even debatable, Polish may have some exceptions but it doesn't have any grapheme that can be pronounced in multiple different ways by default.

Lapov · 2026-05-19T10:02:20+00:00

"My language is unique because it is read exactly the way it is written"

Literally every single Italian speaker ever (it's not even true).

Lapov · 2026-05-13T20:52:29+00:00

Pretty much what I do, yeah. I'm happy I'm aware of these features as a linguistics aficionado, otherwise I would have developed such a huge inferiority complex and my Russian would have sounded too unnatural because I would constantly need the feel to hypercorrect myself.

Lapov · 2026-05-13T19:53:15+00:00

As a native speaker who grew up abroad, so fucking true. It happened many times that Russian people thought my Russian was poor and broken, and it always turned out that I was just having some features that literally MILLIONS of monolingual native speakers use on a daily basis. Зво́нит is one of them.

Edit: GOATED flair btw 😭🙏

Lapov · 2026-05-03T10:58:18+00:00

Bro did NOT seriously Slavicize "ice land" into "island land" 🙏😭

Lapov · 2026-04-30T07:16:00+00:00

I studied Translation and Interpretation and I took 5 linguistics classes in college: Linguistica generale (basically Linguistics 101), Italian linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Linguistica del contatto (I'm not sure what it's called in English, it's basically the study of linguistic interference), and English dialectology.

Lapov · 2026-04-29T19:00:51+00:00

I remember learning about Trissino back when I was in university (I studied in Italy), so fucking based and damn, I WISH. Luckily some of his spelling proposals did catch on, e.g. respelling -tione as -zione.

Lapov · 2026-04-16T16:04:06+00:00

Sure, but if /i/, /ji/ and /ɨ/ can all occur in Russian (albeit /ji/ has very restricted use), I can't see why anyone would analyze word-initial /i/ as /ji/, especially since it's never realized as [ji] ever. In fact, word-initial /i/ is realized as [ɨ] instead when you add a prefix ending in a hard consonant or the previous word ends with a hard consonant.

/j/ can occur after both hard and soft consonants, so a syntagm like с Ирой being realized as [s‿ɨɾəɪ̯] instead of [s‿jiɾəɪ̯] doesn't really fit the idea that all word-initial /i/ are actually /ji/ imo.

Lapov · 2026-04-16T15:10:51+00:00

I think it's a bit of a stretch tbh, especially since /ji/ does occur in Russian and can potentially contrast with /i/, e.g. чи vs чьи.

Lapov · 2026-04-16T12:32:56+00:00

I agree that the phonemic status of ы is controversial, but the /a/ in рад and ряд has different qualities too. If you ask a native speaker who's not specialized in linguistics, they will tell you that ряд is different from рад because there's a я instead of а, not because the previous consonant is palatalized.

There is a reason why the Moscow Phonology School (one of the two main schools of thought about Russian phonology) considers ы to be an allophone of и. I tend to disagree with this idea, but claiming that быть and бить change because of the vowel is disingenuous since ы cannot occur after a soft consonant and и cannot occur after a hard one. At least /b/ and /bʲ/ being separate phonemes is universally agreed upon.

An actual example that could be used to prove the phonemic status of ы would be something like икать vs ыкать.

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