Phonetic correlations of the Russian and Slovak languages: Vocalism

Abstract

The correlation analysis of vocal systems of the Russian and Slovak languages, in which phonological spaces are determined by the number and set of phoneme-forming differential characteristics of vowels, was performed. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the conscious assimilation of the Russian and Slovak languages is favorable at all levels of the language systems because of their kinship and proximity. However, even in this case, there are difficulties leading to active interference, especially at the phonetic level. For the first time, a correlation description of the phonemes composition of the Russian and Slovak vowels was carried out. It is correlative linguistics that has some advantages in terms of solving the practical problems of comparative linguistics. The study was performed in order to update the phonetic similarities in a closely related language environment, where the fact of kinship of languages often leads to the fact that the learner pays attention only to similarities, thereby ignoring differences in the similarities themselves. The terms of correlative linguistics were used: antecedent, correlate, and correspondence. As a result of the study, the following findings were made: five relatively complete correspondences with common phoneme-forming signs, five partial matches stating the absence of certain properties characteristic of the phoneme of the correlate, six zero matches indicating the presence of an antecedent sign, which is not typical for the phonetic system of the correlate and vice versa. It was revealed that the index of the degree of vocalism conformity in the Russian and Slovak languages is 0.25.

Keywords

• correlative linguistics
• russian language
• slovak language
• vocalism
• phonetic correlations
• matching degree index