this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Okay, help me out here. What is the little letter after н and before и? I learned to read Cyrillic from Serbian and they didn't use it.
Заполярный? Ы. If you pronounce it as e/i you can get "cute"(мило) instead of "soap"(мыло).
How is it normally pronounced? Both e and i in English can be pronounced in a lot of different ways, so is it like the sound in "way" or more like "tree"? I'm used to и being the "tree" sound
Neither. But 'й' sounds like 'y' in "way“.
https://youtu.be/N8TYZabKUNA
So it's sort of an ü? That's what my brain hears in the video.
Checking against the ipa given on Wikipedia, I get that ы is the close central unrounded vowel while ü is the close front unrounded vowel. Listening to the audio samples on those pages, I literally cannot hear the difference.
~~There is small difference, but close enough.~~ Yes.
Yeah, I can feel the difference when I say it, but... Well, suffice to say it's not a sound in any of the languages I speak well.
Thanks for indulging a curious language nerd.