Pronunciation Rules for Russian: A Systematic Approach for Converting Russian Spelling to Sound

This book presents a systematic approach to the spelling and pronunciation of Contemporary Standard Russian. Beginning with the standard orthography, three transcriptions are derived: the first is appropriate for grammatical (morphological) analysis, the second and third for phonology and phonetics. Students start with what they know--the spelling--and, by using ordered sets of rules, they learn to rewrite Russian words in a way that shows the details of their actual pronunciation. The principles reflected in the rules are valid for all Russian words and are worth knowing in their own right; at the same time, students become familiar with many of the notational devices and technical terms that are commonly used in linguistic description, in addition to many basic grammatical principles of the Russian language. This book my be used by students with one year of Russian and is suitable also for advanced classes.

Tom Priestly is Emeritus Professor of Russian Language and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Alberta, where he taught from 1970 through 2002. He has translated poetry and prose from Slovene to English. His research hasa been in synchronic Slavic (and particularly Slovene) linguistics and sociolinguistics, especially minority language maintenance and political linguistics; but he maintains his interest in Russian phonetics and phology, the major subjects of his research in the 1970s.

Bruce Derwing is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Alberta, where he taught from 1968 through 1996. His early research focused on the philosophy of linguistics and child language, but most of his career has been devoted to the cross-linguistic experimental investigation of the psychological reality of phonological and morphological units, with a special interest in the role of orthographic knowledge on the perceived segmentation of speech. He has also had a long-standing pedagogical interest in the teaching of Russian phonetics and phonology to non-native learners.