Authors

Discussion

In 1998, the Ukrainian scholar Serhii Doroshenko suggested introduction of devoicing of all the obstruents, both in obstruent cluster (dužka [šk] ‘arc’) and before a word boundary (lid# [t] ‘ice’) into the norms of Standard Ukrainian. He argued that this phenomenon is typical of the bulk of not only southwestern Ukrainian dialects, but also in Southeast Ukrainian which constitutes the core of the standard variety. Another Ukrainian scholar, Ol’ha Muromtsva (2000), vehemently rejected this proposal, claiming that Doroshenko has misinterpreted dialectal data and  did not take into consideration the long-term Russification of the orthoepic /orthographic norms of Ukrainian.

The proposed paper deals with both the ubstandard and standard representation of phonemic voicing in Ukrainian as controversially discussed by the two Ukrainian scholars. Based on Henning Andersen’s theory of a historical transition from the opposition between tenues (voiceless, tense obstruents p, t, k, etc.) and mediae (voiced, lax obstruents b, d, g, etc.) to a phonemic opposition based on phonemic voicing in (East) Slavic, we argue that both Doroshenko and Muromtseva were right in noting different aspects of the above process. While Doroshenko observed the tendency in progress in the Ukrainian dialects, Muromtseva stressed the prevalence of the protensity system in the standard variety of Ukrainian. The question arises as to the future of the phonemic system of standard Ukrainian