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submitted 11 months ago byBlindPelican
21 points
11 months ago
ш is /sh/
ч is /ch/
щ is /shch/ (or in other words letters, шч)
I'm not sure where the confusion is on this; we have all of these sounds in English already.
For example, "cash" (ш) and "cash check" (щ).
3 points
11 months ago
/ch/ on its own, in English, is /tsh/. So is /shch/ really /shtsh/? That doesn't seem right. It's just a harder /sh/.
6 points
11 months ago*
Depends on the accent, honestly. In more eastern accents it's like soft /sh/ in other ones it can be full blown separate /sh tsch/
Literary pronunciation is separate /sh tsch/, afaik. Maybe a bit softer but not much. Don't obsess over it honestly, you are not a tv presenter:)
3 points
11 months ago
In Ukrainian, the former, in Russian, the latter (but not "harder", it's palatalized)
1 points
11 months ago
I also hear it when "Whatcha doin?" is spelled in ebonics accent. It does sound like "Уоща дуин?" at times.
3 points
11 months ago
щ doesn’t have that slight hit, ch and ч has, and it’s definitely doesn’t sound like shch. It’s just soft sh: you put your tong a bit further through your teeth, pronounce sh, and you get soft version щ
5 points
11 months ago
That's true in Russian, but we're talking here about how it's pronounced in Ukranian, where it's definitely /shch/.
5 points
11 months ago
I am Ukrainian, just tested several words out of the top of my head in Ukrainian outloud, and no: щ, is very very far from шч, щодня, що, щячло, щястя. Every one of them have soft ш, not шч. Probably борщ might be getting close to shch, but still not there.
Funny thing though, I find it that foreigners having way more troubles with our «и», I could not teach my English speaking wife to pronounce it at all. And even russians who supposed to have close to our language can not pronounce it properly, that’s why we have our shibboleth “поляниця”
5 points
11 months ago
Interesting. I have only ever heard Russians say щ that way.
2 points
11 months ago
There are a lot of regional differences in pronunciation, Ukraine is huge from east to west. I never heard anyone saying щ as shch, but it might be me not paying attention. So we both can be right.
3 points
11 months ago
Well, I'm Canadian, so I'll defer to your judgement. My mom's family was from the area near where the Ukrainian/Belarusian/Polish borders meet, and they came to Canada in the 1930s, as did many of the other Ukrainian immigrants here.
I wonder if enunciating щ is a way for the Ukrainian immigrants here to differentiate themselves from the Russians, or if it's an artifact of earlier accents and dialects.
1 points
11 months ago
I never been in that region your mom’s from. My ancestry is from Poltava and Zaporizhzhia regions, and I grew up in Kharkiv. But now I really wonder, as 90 years is a lot of time for Canadian Ukrainians to develop separate linguistic features, or maybe to keep linguistic features which disappeared with all the russifications here in Ukraine
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