There’s a lot of people who say Russian
sounds similar to other languages some say it sounds like Portuguese,
others say it sounds like Polish which makes sense since both
Russian and Polish are slavic languages And some people say it sounds like backwards English? for some reason? But one language I never hear compared to the sound of Russian is that of a nearby neighbor, Japanese, which when first thinking about it it sounds absurd to compare the two as sounding similar. Japanese has nearly all open syllables
such as in neko, mizu, kawa, and tenki while Russian has a lot of consonant
clusters and relatively lax phonotactics leading to some combinations of sounds
some might find hard to pronounce like gdje, vstrétitʹ, or mgnovénije.
Russian also has heavy vowel reduction where vowels get reduced to
ə and ɪ such as in óbloko and žénščina, while vowels in Japanese don’t really get reduced. And while this is all true, comparing the phonology of the two languages, I see a surprising amount of similarities between them. And it’s just too cool not to talk about. For one, pretty much every single consonant in Japanese and Russian has a corresponding similar sound to the other language. Here’s a chart with the
Russian consonant inventory, here’s Japanese’s, and here’s both of them with the similarities and differences highlighted. As you can tell, pretty much every one of them aligns, or at least gets pretty close to each other. The main discrepancies are russian /v/
with Japanese /w/, which while distinct, speakers of either language might not be able to tell the difference though Japanese /w/ is realized as one of many different ways depending on the variety of Japanese being spoken The other discrepancy is the /l/ /r/ distinction found in russian but not japanese, which only has /r/, but as with /w/, the japanese /r/ phoneme is quite variable, and in some varieties can even be an l, one realization in particular, /ɽ/, sounds to my ears at least, like it’s between /l/ and /r/. The vowels are similar too, both languages can be classified as having five vowel systems a e i o and u although the japanese u is realized closer
to /ɯ/, similar to the english oo (ʊ) as in book. Russian disputably has a sixth vowel, /ɨ/, though with mostly complementary distribution with the vowel /i/. But japanese has this vowel too, as an alternate pronounciation of /ɯ/ in some contexts. However, if we take a look at cyrillic, the alphabet used to write Russian, you’ll see 10 vowel letters instead of 5 or 6 This is because Russian distinguishes between hard and soft consonants, non-palatalized and palatalized. In basic terms, soft consonants have a /j/ sound following them, and hard consonants don’t, with 5 of the vowels corresponding to soft consonants and the other 5 correspond to hard consonants, each of which can be described as an
allophone of a e i o and u respectively. Japanese also has palatalization, the vowel i palatalizes consonants it comes after, and there are also glides /ja/ /jo/ and /ju/ and many of the palatalized consonants in either language appear similar to each other. This is prevalent in both languages because soft or palatalized consonants appear all the time in Russian and in Japanese a /j/ glide is the only sound that can follow a consonant at the beginning of syllables, and appears all the time in chinese loanwords, of which japanese has a lot These features combine to make words generally seem a little similar between Japanese and Russian. But the words where this similarity is most striking is in adjectives. In Japanese, all verb-like adjectives end in -i, either as -ai, -ii, -oi, or -ui, Russian has a lot more endings than this due to having to agree with nouns for case, gender, and plurality, the dictionary form, the singular nominative masculine form, is almost the exact same as the -ii ending in Japanese. There are also demonstratives, which act similarly to adjectives, that have the -oi ending, such as kakóy and inóy. Of course, Russian has lots of consonant clusters, while Japanese in contrast barely has any consonant clusters at all, only involving double consonants or the nasal coda /ɴ/ but this is only the case phonemically. In most varieties of Japanese, the vowels
/i/ and /ɯ/ can be devoiced between voiceless consonants or at the end of words. This makes some words sound like they have no vowel and have word final consonants and consonant clusters! This does have its limits, only voiceless consonants can appear at the end of syllables this way, and voiced ones can’t. Which is similar to in russian, where voiced consonants b d g v z and ž devoice to p t k f s and š at the end of words and before a voiceless consonant. So if we compare the possible coda consonants now, we see they’re pretty similar, at least at the end of words. Of course, there are reasons why no one thinks of Japanese as sounding Russian. Especially because of all the vowel reduction in Russian, which causes words that otherwise seem like Japanese ones in writing to be pronounced quite a bit differently. Plus, languages leave a distinct pattern of sound and sounding similarly to each other is not the norm. But it also baffles me how these languages have so many similarities in their phonologies and syllable structure especially since you wouldn’t expect to find so many similarities between them! And this isn’t just the case with Japanese and Russian, you could probably find similarities that all sorts of languages have with each other, despite them not being related! That’s all I have to say, до свидания and またね! (goodbye and see you later!)