Automatically transcribe Russian to IPA
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One of the main obstacles for those who are learning Russian is the need to map the pronunciation of Cyrillic characters to correct phonemes. Converting Russian words into International Phonetic Alphabet may help, but is this task of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion as simple as it seems?
Okay, it's just a mapping, right? Python dictionary to the rescue!
Well, not quite. While Russian pronunciation is not as unpredictable as that of English, there are certain rules how some clusters of particular characters must be pronounced. Let's look at some of them:
- Palatalization
- Devoicing of the final obstruent
- Regressive assimilation
- Unpredictable pronunciation of certain words
Almost all consonants in Russian have two realizations: palatalized (soft) and non-palatalized (hard). The palatalization of a consonant occurs when it preceeds such Russian vowels as я, и, е, ё, ю and the soft sign ь. Exception: there is no palatalization after post-alveolar fricatives (ж - [ʐ], ш - [ʂ]) and an alveolar affticate (ц - [t͡s]).
An obstruent is a speech sound produced by pushing the airflow over some obstruction. The majority of Russian obstruents are classified in pairs of a 'voiced' and a 'voiceless' sound, e.g. г-к, в-ф, б-п. When a voiced obstruent occurs in the final position, it is devoiced, i.e. replaced by its voiceless counterpart.
Examples: хлеб (bread) — [xljep], but хлебa (multiple loaves of bread) — [xljeba].
In Russian, the voiceness of a consonant often depends on that of the following consonant. In other words, Russian demonstrates a case of regressive assimilation of such a quality as voiceness. For example, a voiced sound is replaced by its voiceless counterpart if the next sound is also voiceless: грядка (garden bed) — [grjatka]. An opposite situation — a voiceless sound assimilates to the following voiced one: вокзал (train station) — [vogzal].
There are some words which pronunciations do not conform to any rules and exceptions and thus must be memorized.
Examples: бог (god) — [box], бухгалтер (accountant) — [bugalter], пожалуйста (please) — [poʐalusta], что (what) — [ʂto].
Transcribe Russian to IPA automatically
Here is a tool that can automatically translate Russian texts to International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). NB: this tool is a side project that I work on in my spare time. It's still under development and may lack some of the planned functionalities.