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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re:_This_must_be_Bulgarian_=28audiobook=3f=29_--_Russian_?=
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Date: Sat, 18 May 2024 16:17:20 +1200
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On 18/05/2024 8:57 a.m., Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2024-05-17, Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
> 
>>> The Russian title is: Гёдель, Ешер, Бах: Эта бесконечная гирлянда
>>
>> I don't know why, but the Russian title shows first, then the Bulgarian,
>> where they spell it Гьодел. Russian ё normally spells /jo/; here it
>> seems to be rendering the foreign vowel /ö/, perhaps just because it
>> looks a bit like the German letter. But the Bulgarians seem to be
>> representing it as /jo/ -- could the Bulgarian version be a
>> re-translation of the Russian?
> 
> There are a lot of things in here.
> 
> I'll start by stressing that in the modern Slavic languages the
> iotated vowel letters primarily indicate that the preceding consonant
> is palatalized.  Only in special positions, e.g. at the start of
> the word, do the iotated vowel letters also represent an actual
> glide consonant /j/ preceding the vowel.
> 
> If you look across the modern variants of the Cyrillic alphabet as
> used by the Eastern Slavic languages and Bulgarian, as well as
> historical versions, you will notice that there are iotated versions
> of a, e, and u, but there is no iotated o.  (Bear with me.)
> I assume that reflects a historical phonotactical restraint such
> that there were no palatalized consonants before o.  I don't know
> enough about the history of the Slavic languages for details.  On
> the rare occasions that the modern languages have a palatalized
> consonant before o, Ukrainian and Bulgarian use a soft sign + o
> spelling, i.e., <ьо>.

I'm remembering, without consulting any books, but I think there is no 
actual palatalization before (historic) a,o,u, as one might expect.
The Russian я following palatalized consonant comes from the front nasal 
vowel *ę; the ё, as you mentioned, results from *e > o in a certain 
environment; and unless I'm mistaken ю only represents /ju/ in native 
Slavic words -- Cю sequences occur in borrowed words like сюрприз 
'surprise'.

> Russian stands out because it has a sort of iotated o, <ё>.  However,
> that is the result of a late soundshift, where stressed /e/ after
> but not before a palatalized consonant shifted somewhat inconsistently
> to /o/.  This continued to be written <е> until <ё> was created
> around 1800, and even today <ё> is not consistently differentiated
> from <е> in Russian orthographic practice.
> 
> Belarusian also has <ё>.
> 
> When it comes to transcribing the German (French) front vowels
> represented by ö (eu) and ü (u), Russian uses the iotated vowels
> <ё> and <ю>.  This could be related to the fact that the Russian
> vowels have fronted allophones after (ё) or between (ю) palatalized
> consonants.

Yes, this is a better reason for using ё and ю. It also accounts for the 
Bulgarians using ьо /jo/. (Found another example: шофьор 'driver'.)

> Ukrainian picks <е> and <ю> for transcribing the same foreign vowels,
> i.e., it unrounds the mid vowel.
> 
> Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder is rendered like this:
> ru: Герхард Шрёдер
> uk: Герхард Шредер
> bg: Герхард Шрьодер
> 
> There is another aspect that might have some bearing on this.
> Although a language like German (or English or French) does not
> _distinguish_ between palatalized and unpalatalized consonants,
> there is presumably some degree of allophonic palatalization happening
> before front vowels.  So maybe my pronunciation of München has an
> initial /mʲ/ to Russian ears, making the transcription Мюнхен quite
> natural.  I don't know.
>