Thread: телефонный - pronunciation

Usual rules. Ustressed "те" or "ле" or "пе" or "ре" and so on can be:
"тьэ", "льэ" in clear and loud speech
or "ти", "ли" in quick and fluent speech that can be reduced to "unstressed unclear wovel" futher.

All you note is that clear and quick pronunciation can be mixed in one word with different syllables without noticing.

Rules are rules, despite of origin of word we say it as russian language implies.
The only thing I cannot understand why "Babylon" was converted to "Вавилон" (v <-> b conversion in bible texts seems to be popular long time ago)

Originally Posted by Alex80

The only thing I cannot understand why "Babylon" was converted to "Вавилон" (v <-> b conversion in bible texts seems to be popular long time ago)

That’s because of the translation chains biblical names had traversed before they came into English or Russian.
Roughly speaking, it’s
(name’s language of origin) → (Hebrew) → Greek → Latin → English
and
(name’s language of origin) → (Hebrew) → Greek → Old Slavic → Russian.

The [b]→[v] sound change had happened in Greek during the centuries between the Latin and the Slavic translations were made. So, the biblical proper names appear with [b] in the Latin translation and with [v] in the Slavic one according to the Greek pronunciation of that periods.

(Btw, the reason why the Cyrillic letter В looks like the Latin letter B is the same. Both letters are descendants of the Greek Letter Β, but the borrowing happened in different time periods.)

It’s also amusing that [b]↔[v] changes in the word Babylon had also happened in Accadian → Hebrew and Hebrew → Greek stages of the chain. In Hebrew the [b] and [v] sounds are allophones with [v] appearing after vowels and [b] elsewhere. So, Accadian /bābili/ (transcription from wikipedia) became בָּבֶל [bɑ̄vɛl] in Hebrew. Then, Ancient Greek language lacking the [v] sound made it back Babylon.