Pronunciations you had to unlearn

[Yalensky]

The letter щ represents ɕ, and always has; there's really no wiggle room on that point.

The problem is that in Old Russian ɕ was represented by ш! Ш later became a hard consonant, moving back into mouth to /ʂ/, leaving room for a new soft /ɕ/ to be developed later. If щ was always /ɕ/, then it should also have shifted to /ʂ/, but it didn't. It must have been pronounced other than /ɕ/ at some point.

How do we know ш was once /ɕ/? One reason is that it is subject to the same spelling rules as soft consonants. For example, unstressed o > e after soft consonants, though this also includes after hard ш (and ж as well, which likewise switched from soft to hard). Hence spellings like хорoшего rather than хорошого. The ш in this word is hard today.

Source: Tore Nesset, How Russian Came to Be the Way It Is (2015), which is a great book for linguistically-minded students of Russian. Your post set me to browsing it again.

EDIT: And here are some shots of the pages where Nesset discusses the rise of /ɕ/ from /ɕtɕ/ (though he spells it using a non-IPA system particular to Slavic linguistics). There appears to be no controversy among slavicists over the source of the sound. The Latin transcription "shch" indeed is reflecting an older pronunciation.

[Moose-tache]

So the East Slavic languages created a cluster out of nothing, for no phonological reason whatsoever, and then got rid of it just in time for recording technology to be invented? I am suspicious of this.

[Yalensky]

Well, yes, though you're exaggerating: by "nothing", you mean "in East Slavic, from Proto-Slavic [stj] and [skj]", and by "just in time for recording technology to be invented" you mean "sometime in the many centuries before Edison's wax cylinders". In that perspective, this is not even in like the top 100 of "weird sound changes you won't believe".

(On the other hand, OCS Щ /ʃt/ and ЖД /ʒd/ come from *tj and *dj, IIRC, and that is much weirder, since you'd expect the consonants of each pair to be flipped. The identification of ЖД as /ʒd/ is obvious from the spelling. I sometimes read "the variation of OCS Щ varied from dialect to dialect," but calling it /ʃt/ or at least saying this was a stage of its pronunciation seems fine to me based on 1) alternating spellings of Щ and ШТ, 2) parallelism with ЖД, and 3) Bulgarian having Щ /ʃt/, and 4) Щ possibly coming from a ligature of Ш and Т. But a further mystery: why did they devise a single letter for /ʃt/ but not for /ʒd/?)

[Sol717]

And bathed every veyne in swich licour [and ˈbaːðəd ˌevrɪ ˈvein ɪn ˈswɪtʃ lɪˈkʰuːr]
Of which vertu engendred is the flour [ov ˈʍɪtʃ verˈtʰuː enˈdʒendrəd ɪz ðə ˈfluːr]
(The Prologue is in iambic pentametre, mostly in lines of four primary stresses.)

I'm a bit late in responding here, but vertu would've ended in a diphthong of the /iu̯/ type (/verˈtiu̯/); modern /ˈvəːtʃʉː/ etc. implies earlier /tʃuː/ < /tjuː/ < /tiu̯/. I differ from you in the reconstruction of unstressed vowels; my very unorthodox view is that Middle English schwa wasn't a thing, or at least wasn't much of a thing. Another controversial view of mine is that the ancestor to the KIT vowel (and FOOT) was tense; this isn't so unorthodox.

[Pabappa]

infidel I thought it had 2nd syllable stress and a long I sound growing up, and that it was Arabic
debauch a lot of young people & english learners probably use /k/ here but its /tš/

[Kuchigakatai]

And bathed every veyne in swich licour [and ˈbaːðəd ˌevrɪ ˈvein ɪn ˈswɪtʃ lɪˈkʰuːr]
Of which vertu engendred is the flour [ov ˈʍɪtʃ verˈtʰuː enˈdʒendrəd ɪz ðə ˈfluːr]
(The Prologue is in iambic pentametre, mostly in lines of four primary stresses.)

I'm a bit late in responding here, but vertu would've ended in a diphthong of the /iu̯/ type (/verˈtiu̯/); modern /ˈvəːtʃʉː/ etc. implies earlier /tʃuː/ < /tjuː/ < /tiu̯/. I differ from you in the reconstruction of unstressed vowels; my very unorthodox view is that Middle English schwa wasn't a thing, or at least wasn't much of a thing. Another controversial view of mine is that the ancestor to the KIT vowel (and FOOT) was tense; this isn't so unorthodox.

Nice comments, you, (relatively) new person! I am little-read on the topic of Middle English reconstructions really, so these opinions are very interesting. I've noticed that transcriptions of Middle English I've come across tend to vary on whether KIT and FOOT are tense or lax (I don't know what evidence there is either way), but why do you have the very unorthodox view that ME schwa was... I imagine [e]?

[Travis B.]

Note that evidence shows that vowel reduction was already taking place by late Old English, as shown by confusion between different unstressed vowels that had developed by then.

[Linguoboy]

Note that evidence shows that vowel reduction was already taking place by late Old English, as shown by confusion between different unstressed vowels that had developed by then.

Conversely, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that borrowed words like vertu and engendre were treated differently, at least for a time. At what point did the unstressed vowel here become [œ]?

[Kuchigakatai]

This is more of a pronunciation that's plain wrong, but it's been bothering me for a long time.

That textbooks have fallen behind current usage is not too surprising. Much like your complaint about how Russian щ is described, I still see Spanish textbooks and dictionaries describing ll as [ʎ], even though that sound now only exists in pockets of northern Spain and the Andes, in non-prestigious accents (probably influenced in part by Basque or Quechua/Aymara respectively, I imagine, since those languages have /ʎ/).

When I was learning English, while still living in El Salvador, I remember once buying a copy of The University of Chicago Spanish-English English-Spanish Dictionary, in an edition from 2000 or so. To my amusement, it taught that the English future constructed with 'will' is conjugated thus: you/he/she/it/they will but I/we shall, something that even badly-informed prescriptivists tend not to insist on... (Some prescriptivists have indeed claimed this though, presumably out of a feeling that 'shall' is both more humble and more certain and therefore more appropriate than 'will' for the 1st person.)

Conversely, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that borrowed words like vertu and engendre were treated differently, at least for a time. At what point did the unstressed vowel here become [œ]?

Vertu had /ɛ/ in French then and also does today.

[Kuchigakatai]

This is more of a pronunciation that's plain wrong, but it's been bothering me for a long time.

That textbooks have fallen behind current usage is not too surprising. Much like your complaint about how Russian щ is described, I still see Spanish textbooks and dictionaries describing ll as [ʎ],

I just checked my copy of Butt, Benjamin and Rodriguez's A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (2019, 6th edition), and it does describe <ll> as "Palatalized l, as in Spanish llamo. Tongue flat against root of mouth", and later notes, "[ʎ] must be distinguished from [ly] in words like pollo [pó-ʎo] ‘chicken’ (for cooking) and polio [pó-lyo] ’polio’ (the disease)." Awful, and awfully normal.

Mind you that this is the grammar of Spanish most often cited in works in English. Phonetics is just not their forte...

[KathTheDragon]

Is Spanish ll generally pronounced as [j] then?

[Estav]

Is Spanish ll generally pronounced as [j] then?

It's pronounced the same as syllable-initial <y>, which is generally a bit more constricted than [j].

In some accents, it's something like [ʝ] or [ɟʝ], which might be in free variation with a more lenis [j] pronunciation, and which can be argued to be an allophone of /i/ as it does not contrast with [ i] or [j] as long as syllabification is treated as contrastive: [ i] occurs in the syllable nucleus, [ʝ~ɟʝ~j] as a non-syllabic start to the syllable, and [j] or [ i̯] when the sound neither starts the syllable nor acts as the nucleus.

In other accents, <y>/<ll> has been fortited to a sibilant, either a voiced fricative or affricate like [dʒ] or [ʒ] or a voiceless fricative [ʃ]. In accents with sibilant <y>/<ll>, there may be a phonemic split from [j] in syllable-initial position: words spelled with <hi> + vowel like hierba may be pronounced with [j] in contrast to the [ʒ] or [ʃ] found in word spelled with <ll>/<y>.

[Kuchigakatai]

and which can be argued to be an allophone of /i/ as it does not contrast with [ i] or [j] as long as syllabification is treated as contrastive:

Do you happen to know of discussions of this contrastive syllabification? I recently had an argument with someone who insisted I was making up this analysis of [ʝ~ɟʝ~j], and that he had never heard of anything like phonemic syllabification, so using dots in a phonemic representation as in /en.ˈie.so/ [enˈɟʝeso] 'I add a cast [to someone's arm, leg]', /re.ˈnie.go/ [re.ˈnie.go] 'I insist not to', was nonsense. I was stumped because I'm just not familiar with the Spanish phonetic literature, and it seemed like that person would respect screenshots / photos where argument wouldn't.

In other accents, <y>/<ll> has been fortited to a sibilant, either a voiced fricative or affricate like [dʒ] or [ʒ] or a voiceless fricative [ʃ]. In accents with sibilant <y>/<ll>, there may be a phonemic split from [j] in syllable-initial position: words spelled with <hi> + vowel like hierba may be pronounced with [j] in contrast to the [ʒ] or [ʃ] found in word spelled with <ll>/<y>.

You get that split in dialects without sibilant <y,ll> too, because they contrast it against syllable-initial [ɟʝ], so they have hiervo [ˈjeɾ.βo] 'I boil sth' vs. yerno [ˈɟʝeɾ.no](~[ˈjeɾ.no]) 'son-in-law' (and dialects with sibilant <y,ll> typically have [ˈjeɾ.βo] vs. [ˈdʒeɾ.no]~[ʒeɾ.no]).

I find it interesting that in some dialects the phoneme patterns exactly alongside /b d g/, with [ɟʝ~dʒ] where there's [ b d g], and [ʒ~ʃ~ʝ~j] where there's [β̞ ð̞ ɣ̞]. But this is not true of all, like Bogota Spanish and it use of intervocalic [ɟʝ] (hallar [a.ˈɟʝaɾ]). (This is why I wrote "[ˈdʒeɾ.no]~[ʒeɾ.no]", as some if not most Rioplatense speakers may allow [dʒ] after a pause or a nasal, but only let [ʒ~ʃ] after a vowel, [h] or liquid.)

[Travis B.]

When I was learning English, while still living in El Salvador, I remember once buying a copy of The University of Chicago Spanish-English English-Spanish Dictionary, in an edition from 2000 or so. To my amusement, it taught that the English future constructed with 'will' is conjugated thus: you/he/she/it/they will but I/we shall, something that even badly-informed prescriptivists tend not to insist on... (Some prescriptivists have indeed claimed this though, presumably out of a feeling that 'shall' is both more humble and more certain and therefore more appropriate than 'will' for the 1st person.)

I had no problems finding sites for non-native learners on the interwebs which recommended one use shall with I / we, even though the only case where I hear this usage IRL is in questions, i.e. shall I... or shall we....

[Estav]

and which can be argued to be an allophone of /i/ as it does not contrast with [ i] or [j] as long as syllabification is treated as contrastive:

Do you happen to know of discussions of this contrastive syllabification? I recently had an argument with someone who insisted I was making up this analysis of [ʝ~ɟʝ~j], and that he had never heard of anything like phonemic syllabification, so using dots in a phonemic representation as in /en.ˈie.so/ [enˈɟʝeso] 'I add a cast [to someone's arm, leg]', /re.ˈnie.go/ [re.ˈnie.go] 'I insist not to', was nonsense. I was stumped because I'm just not familiar with the Spanish phonetic literature, and it seemed like that person would respect screenshots / photos where argument wouldn't.

I encountered this analysis in works by José Ignacio Hualde; e.g. "Spanish /i/ and related sounds: An exercise in phonemic analysis" (1997) and "Quasi-Phonemic Contrasts in Spanish" (2006).

[anteallach]

That textbooks have fallen behind current usage is not too surprising. Much like your complaint about how Russian щ is described, I still see Spanish textbooks and dictionaries describing ll as [ʎ], even though that sound now only exists in pockets of northern Spain and the Andes, in non-prestigious accents (probably influenced in part by Basque or Quechua/Aymara respectively, I imagine, since those languages have /ʎ/).

Indeed. When I first went to Spain, the books I'd read led me to expect that <ll> was [ʎ] and <y> was [j] (I'm sure they mentioned the possibility of merger, but didn't indicate that it might happen in central Spain) and then I found that the Spanish speakers I was working with all not only had the merger but used something like [ɟʝ] in the positions where /b d g/ are plosives.

[Kuchigakatai]

Indeed. When I first went to Spain, the books I'd read led me to expect that <ll> was [ʎ] and <y> was [j] (I'm sure they mentioned the possibility of merger, but didn't indicate that it might happen in central Spain) and then I found that the Spanish speakers I was working with all not only had the merger but used something like [ɟʝ] in the positions where /b d g/ are plosives.

Unfortunate. It's widespread in the North too. The couple people I've met from northern Spain had the merger, and told me they knew no one who still had the /ʎ/ distinction. They were highly-educated and from the large cities of San Sebastián and Oviedo though, so maybe just not rural enough to have heard /ʎ/. Kind of surprising with the former because San Sebastián is right in the middle of the Basque Country region, but then again she was a professor of literature...

[Linguoboy]

Unfortunate. It's widespread in the North too. The couple people I've met from northern Spain had the merger, and told me they knew no one who still had the /ʎ/ distinction. They were highly-educated and from the large cities of San Sebastián and Oviedo though, so maybe just not rural enough to have heard /ʎ/. Kind of surprising with the former because San Sebastián is right in the middle of the Basque Country region, but then again she was a professor of literature...

I would've expected the distinction to be maintained among Catalan-Spanish bilinguals but I suppose the imperfect correlation in cognates (where Catalan /ʎ/ occasionally corresponds to Spanish /ʎ/, but frequently to /l/ and /x/) works to undermine this.

[Sol717]

Nice comments, you, (relatively) new person! I am little-read on the topic of Middle English reconstructions really, so these opinions are very interesting. I've noticed that transcriptions of Middle English I've come across tend to vary on whether KIT and FOOT are tense or lax (I don't know what evidence there is either way), but why do you have the very unorthodox view that ME schwa was... I imagine [e]?

You'd be correct there; I have a feeling that the prevailing analysis of ME is based too much on extrapolation from Modern English/Dutch/etc.; instead it should be analysed like Austrian Standard German with tense /i u/ and /e/ in unstressed positions. This isn't a view I'm absolutely dead-set on; it can be considered more of a hunch. Consider the following:

• While spellings such as takun for taken appear in ME sporadically, most spellings of unstressed vowels after the confusion from the OE merger of unstressed vowels indicate a front quality; other spellings occur primarily in specific lexemes bishop or next to /l r n/ taken (indicating a syllabic consonant?)
• Orthoepists such as Alexander GIl identify the vowel in many words with modern schwa or schwi as being the DRESS vowel; Shakespeare rhymes his spread /sprɛd/ with buried /buriɛd/ in Sonnet 24.
• The prevailing explanation of the distribution of schwi and schwa in ModE resulting from schwa being raised and fronting in some environments is unsatisfactory and based too much on the present distribution of schwi/schwa. Any argument based the current situation is fallacious, as many examples of historic schwi (e.g. in pigeon) are now schwa in dictionary RP; I find it easier to suppose that schwi is original and that schwa was gradually introduced by lexical conditioning in the Early Modern period. This gives more reason to suppose a original front vowel.

As for Middle English having tense /i u/, others can make the case better than I ever could; search for Lass's How Early does English Get 'Modern'? and The Early Modern English Short Vowels Noch Einmal, Again.

Note that evidence shows that vowel reduction was already taking place by late Old English, as shown by confusion between different unstressed vowels that had developed by then.

I agree that OE unstressed vowels collapsed; I just don't think think the result was schwa (it may have been somewhat centralised, but it would have been primarily front in "mainstream" ME)

[jal]

I was today years old that I learned "veil" isn't pronounced like "veal", but rhymes with "hail".


JAL