It's hard to describe in writing, but I'll try. There's no "h" sound, like the one where you just exhale, neither in Russian nor Ukrainian. The Russian "?" is hard, like "g" in "get". The Ukrainian equivalent to that is "?", but their "?" is something in between, closer to "kh". The fact that many English-language reports about the war do transliterate "?" as "h" in Ukrainian toponyms doesn't help, but it's as close as one could reasonably get to the real Ukrainian pronunciation.
There's so much no such sound that I've seen Hebrew and Arabic transcribed into Russian with the character "h" for that sound.
> Does this phenomenon have some name, as googling didn't turn out much?
Certainly not a formal one. ???????? Or maybe simply ?????????? ???????
In the early days of the Russian invasion, Ukrainians used "palyanytsia" as a shibboleth to detect spies. How well that worked in detecting actual spies is anyone's guess, but you can hear the difference in pronunciations really well if you enter ???????? into Google translate and use the TTS function with Russian and Ukrainian. It's really very difficult for a Russian to learn to pronounce this, but anyone who grew up in Ukraine (even if their first language is Russian and they struggle to converse in Ukrainian, like many older people in the south where I'm from) have no issues with it whatsoever due to many years of exposure to the relevant phonemes.
You can also go to Cyrillic and then use the standard English transliteration: Hodów -> ????? -> Khoduv.
Though it might also have been ????? -> Hodov, with the ? pronounced in the Ukrainian / Belarusian / Ruthenian way, as a throaty H. Seeing old Polish names through those languages is often a worthwhile enterprise.
EDIT: I forgot to do the obvious, and check the current name of the town: ????? - Hodiv - https://maps.app.goo.gl/h6zA61k6CNTAEf787. Here ? is pronounced as a throaty H.
If person says ?? (da) for "yes" I think they speak Russian.
I think Ukrainians use ??? for "yes". (Someone please confirm or correct me, but I am 90 something percent sure.) (Edit: looked it up and yes, I think I am right: https://www.ukrainianlessons.com/meanings-of-tak/. That said, Russian also have the word ???, so try to infer if they say it as yes (e.g. ??? ??? ???)
Of course many Ukrainians including famously Zelensky himself speak Russian natively even if more and more change to Ukrainian.
So a surer sign might be to say: "Slava Ukraini" and expect back "Heroim Slava" or something to that effect ;-)
Along with an interesting story, the Russian-language flyer has fascinating Runglish words, phrasing and grammar.
"????????" (Cleveland) is spelled with "?" at the end, which makes the pronunciation "Cleev-lahnd". The modern version is "????????", which is pronounced almost the same as English.
"?????" is just transliterated "Movies". I suppose the movies were new enough that the current words "????(?????)" (kino(theater)) and "?????" (film) were not in use within the diaspora.
"??'???" uses an apostrophe instead of ?, which is what Ukrainian uses. E.g: "???'???".
"??? ???? ?????? ???" sounds odd. Maybe an English-structured sentence written in Russian, or maybe just the grammar of the times.
Oh, don't worry, it has been the shibboleth word for many years way before this invasion. The beauty here that even if you know the word it is somewhat hard for a person to learn and remember how to pronounce it. I've tried to teach a couple of my non ukrainian friends for many years, they rarely get it nearly right and cannot repeat consistently.
Besides there a few backup words like this, if you need to verify.
> We sampled 31 languages from diverse language families around the world in this study, and we found that all of them have a word with a near-identical sound and function as English Huh?
Is there a table for this? I'm wondering, because I can't readily identify such word in my native language (although I have few candidates that may or may not fit the criteria...) At least, something like "huh" would sound absolutely alien if used in Russian. Phonetically closest I could remember would be "???" [fuh], which has completely different meaning (sound for relief and/or tiredness, interchangeable with "??" [uf]). And maybe "??"/"???" [he/heh], but that's omantopoeia for a snicker. Neither is normally pronounced with a questioning tone. Can't remember anything else sounding any close to "huh".
Just have a feeling that something like "eh?" or, possibly, "hm?" would be more universal. But I didn't any research, that's completely subjective perception.
Especially since there exist words in russian language that actually have "?" before "?", and the sound it makes is different. Compare "?????" and "????" (the closest similar word i could think of by the sound of the first half of it). If you try pronouncing the first word as if "?" wasn't there (or the second word, but as it "?" was there), it will sound both very different and wrong.
Just wanted to note that the acute accent over the ? (in both Russian and Ukrainian) indicates the stress and is only used in fairly narrow contexts such as dictionary entries.
Edit - should revise somewhat. Has to do with slight differences between Russian, modern Ukrainian and older Ukrainian, as well as changes to how Ukrainian is transliterated.
> Using ? quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of ? versus ?? became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies.
Doesn't seem THAT telling to me. Saying "?? ???????" is very common in the Ukrainian language, and lots of Ukrainians use bits of Ukrainian while speaking Russian. I wouldn't be shocked to hear "?? ???????" from a Ukrainian, and I most definitely wouldn't make assumptions about political tendencies based on it.
When I studied Russian we were taught (by native speakers) that ? was pronounced “shch”. But then when we went to Russia literally everyone pronounced it like a longer and softer ?. I still don’t really understand what happened there.
I don't speak Russian, but I had a lot of Russian friends growing up. So I've heard a lot of jokes fall flat in translation from Russian. I thought I recognised the sound.
Apparently even Russian speaking Ukrainians can usually pronounce it as it's a bread commonly eaten at some Ukrainian holiday (source is some random Reddit comment so take with a grain of salt)
There's so much no such sound that I've seen Hebrew and Arabic transcribed into Russian with the character "h" for that sound.
> Does this phenomenon have some name, as googling didn't turn out much?
Certainly not a formal one. ???????? Or maybe simply ?????????? ???????
reply