Voicing in Clusters
Goals
Why does the first consonant in все sound like /ф/, and why does the т in отдел sound like д? In this lesson you’ll work toward a more natural Russian pronunciation by learning about how voiced and unvoiced consonants interact.
Russian spelling doesn’t normally reflect assimilation of voicing: even though we say [lofkǝ], we write ловко.
But there is an exception: prefixes like из-/ис- and раз-/рас- are spelled differently, depending on the following consonant. So we write издать ‘to publish,’ but истощать ‘to exhaust’ or ‘to deplete,’ and раздать ‘to hand out,’ but расходиться ‘to disperse.’ See the pattern?
If we dig deeper, we can see these processes far back enough that the assimilation is reflected in the modern spelling. And that explains the relation between the Old Church Slavonic бъчела and the modern Russian пчела.
