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I'm reading a book at the moment which includes some stuff on phonetics. This leads me to ask for some clarification on the subject of ш vs. щ. Which categories do they fall into? I know that they are both fricatives and both unvoiced (?) but what about the place of articulation?
According to the place of articulation ш and щ belong to prepalatals, and, yes, they're unvoiced consonants.
http://pedlib.hut.ru/Books/pravdina/Image405.gif
Hope the table will be helpful. I'm not pretty much sure of the terminology used in it because it's in some ways different from what I'm used to. Maybe it's too old or just uses the terms of some other linguistic school.
It says there that there are no back-palate consonants in Russian. But I have noticed that many people pronounce "х" as a back-palate one, very much retracted, almost like that grating sound in the Caucasian languages.
[х] is back-palatal according to the table.
Oops! Yes. I wasn't looking right. So, the [x]-sound is 'officially' so.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rtyom