Critical Report¶

The IPA-transcription was highlighted with bold text, enabling us to omit square brackets or slashes that usually mark a phonetic or phonological transcription.

Primary and secondary stresses are assigned according to stresses in spoken words. They do not necessarily have to correspond to the musical phrase. Accentuations are not indicated, but usually result from the musical phrase.

Syllables are not, as usual, marked by punctuation, but with hyphens. As in the orthographic text, we also use underscores at the word ends to facilitate the reading of the transcription. When consonants occur at the end of a syllable in the middle of a word, they are systematically moved to the onset of the following syllable. This rule is only deviated from in exceptional cases, such as the combination with extremely short note values. This approach becomes particularly comprehensible in combination with longer note values and melismas: Many singers aim at staying on sonorous sounds like vowels as long as possible.

This critical report is not a full description of Ukrainian phonology and phonetics. However, some moments in the previous chapter need further comments about some fundamental philological decisions.

The first moment that needs to be clarified is the phenomenon of semi-palatalization. The palatalization of labials /bJ, ʋJ, mJ, pJ, fJ/, velars /ɡJ, kJ, xJ/, glottal /ɦJ/, and post-alveolar /ʒJ, ʧJ, ʃJ, ʤJ/ is quite weak. In different sources they could be called semi-palatalized, semi-soft, half-soft or half-palatalized. Basically, those are the allophones of the corresponding hard consonants, but not the separate phonemes. Although the difference between these allophones and hard phonemes is not that important when they occur before /i/, it is extremely crucial in cases when these consonants precede jotated vowels without an apostrophe. As IPA does not have a special mark for semi-palatalization, in our editions those allophones would be represented with a superscript dotless ‘j’, e.g. /pJ/ in order to distinguish them from the palatalized phonemes. For this we follow a suggestion by Buk et al. (2006).

Another issue that requires further explanations is vowels and their allophones. There are six vowel phonemes in Ukrainian. They are /ɑ, ɛ, ɪ, i, ɔ, u/. Although in Ukrainian there is no phonemic distinction between long and short vowels, still there is a difference in pronunciation of vowels in stressed and unstressed positions. As you may have seen in the Figure 1 (chapter IPA for Ukrainian), the unstressed vowels tend to be more centralized. Phoneme /ɑ/ in unstressed position is represented with allophone [ɐ], /ɔ/ with an allophone [o], and /u/ with an allophone [ʊ]. The main problem occurs in defining the difference between unstressed /ɛ/ and /ɪ/. In our transcriptions we would use allophone [e] in both cases as it seems the right way to represent this sound. Moreover, this way is suggested in most of the texts, dedicated to this topic. More about Ukrainian vowels and their allophones you may read in “Ukrainian vowel phones in the IPA context” by Maksym Vakulenko.

A special feature of Ukrainian are geminates, i.e., elongated consonants, which can be formed by the meeting of two identical consonants, even across syllable boundaries, and which must be considered especially when singing. According to Bratishko (2018) “It is particularly important in singing, as it serves one of the ways of expressing emotions and feelings through the text to create a compelling performance.” (p. 62)

Intonation features and logical accents are mostly dictated by the literary text of the song. Thus, the pronunciation of vowel phonemes, which are characterized by maximum length in singing, should always correspond to specific tasks of the vocal cantilena. Consonant and jotated phonemes, on the other hand, tend to pronounce more instantly and explosively. In order not to disturb the cantilena, consonant sounds (and jotated) must be pronounced quickly, following the rules of pronunciation of open syllables. According to these rules, there are no so-called "closed" syllables in singing. It means that syllables in the poetic text of a song should not be "closed" by a consonant sound (phoneme). If there is such a syllable, the consonant that "closes" it must join the next syllable in the process of singing. To make it easier, in our editions such consonants are moved to the following syllables automatically.

English Translation¶