Reduced

In the ancient Slavic languages , super-short vowel phonemes existed, which were denoted by the letters ъ (" er ") and ь (" ер ") and were derived from Proto-Indo-European (and pre-Slavic ) short and ĭ . However, even in the period of the Slavic community, the weakening of the sound of such vowels began - a phenomenon called the fall of the reduced . This phenomenon played a large role in the formation of the sound and grammatical structure of all Slavic languages.

Weak reduced

Weak reduced were vowels without accent in three cases: at the end of a word, before a syllable with a vowel of full education and before a syllable with a strong reduced. The loss of the weak reduced began during the Slavic community, and in the Old Russian language the weak reduced completely disappeared in the XI - XII centuries , and in the northern dialects in the XIII century .

Strong reduced

The strong position of b and b was a position under the stress and a position in front of a syllable with a weak reduction. Compensating the disappearance of the weak reduced, in the Slavic languages, the strong ones on the contrary became clear in various vowels .

In the western part of the range of Slavic languages, the sound of the reduced became closer and there they became clear in the same way: as a in Western South Slavic languages, and as e in West Slavic (except for some exceptions in Slovak and Upper Luzha ). However, in Polish, in addition, it caused a softening of the previous consonant.

In another part of the South Slavic dialects, it coincided with e , and b gave a sound close to, but without nasalization . Subsequently, ѫ also lost its nasal sound and coincided with this reflex, in the modern Bulgarian letter denoted as ъ . In the Macedonian language I went to about .

In the Eastern Slavic languages, they gave, respectively, o and e , and in the Ukrainian language these new sounds, unlike the “old” o and e , as a rule, did not turn into і in closed syllables. In addition, the "new" e , o in some cases entailed the so-called. second full disagreement : rus. rope < dr.-rusk. vrvka .

Stressed Reduced

Before [j], the reduced ones changed their quality and were written in the letter s , and (in the transcription they are designated as [s] , [anď] with a gachek ).

Stressed reduced Y and Y coincided with the Slavic reflexes * y and * i ( s and), respectively, in all Slavic languages ​​except Russian , where the difference of tense reduced with the others is lost, but in the unstressed endings of adjectives, partly influenced by Church Slavonic orthography, it is written and pronounced also -th , -th (instead of -th , -th ).

One of the varieties of the Old Believer znamenny singing - hom (singing, multidisciplinary) singing - is performed with the vowel pronunciation of reduced vowels: ъ and ь are pronounced as [o] and [e], respectively ^[1] . Khomovaya singing became widespread no later than the XIII century ^[2] , but was out of use in the middle of the XVII century ^[3] , now it is used only by some Old Believers ^[4] .

Whether hom singing is a continuation of the living tradition of the vowel pronunciation of Slavonic reduced, is not yet established (for more details, see Homovaya singing # Causes of occurrence ), but the fact of geographical coincidence of the areas of particularly late fall of reduced ( dialects of the Russian North ) and the prevailing distribution of bespovstvo ( Pomorye ) says in favor of this assumption ^[5] .

In Russian, there are two types of super-short vowels:

1. Appeared "out of nowhere" at the junction of a large number of consonants, so that this combination could be more convenient to say: " Mr. Twister / Former minister ()) p ..." ( Samuel Marshak , the reduction in the poetic size is marked with ())).
2. Decreased from the usual unstressed vowel. Some dialects or dialects of the Russian Federation are filled with many super-short ones. According to Doctor of Philology Sergey Knyazev ^[6] , in Perm dialect one can often hear the reduction:
   • vad - reduced “o” in the word “water”;
   • normal - reduced “o” in the word “normal”;
   • khdit - reduced "o" in the word "walk";
   • tk - reduced "a" in the word "so";
   • ьвъбддился - the sounds of "o" are reduced in the word "freed."

A lot of unstressed vowels in English were shortened to reduced: police [pʰə̆ˈliˑs] ( police ). Rudyard Kipling was one of the first to insert the reduced pronunciation into a poetic size.

• The emergence of reduced vowels in the Proto-Slavic language
• Gavlik's law

• Gorshkova K. V., Khaburgaev K. A. Historical grammar of the Russian language. -M. , 1981.
• V. Ivanov. Reduced vowels // Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary / Editor-in-chief V. N. Yartseva . - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia , 1990. - 685 p. - ISBN 5-85270-031-2 .
• Pimenov I. V. Reduced vowels in the connections of Slavic dialects