Spelling and phonetics (Was: The amazing template which does nothing)

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 29 April 2015 at 10:15:52 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
> On Wednesday, 29 April 2015 at 10:09:39 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 29 April 2015 at 09:57:01 UTC, Vladimir 
>> Panteleev wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 29 April 2015 at 09:44:27 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>>> Just follow your natural way of speaking and you'll be fine. 
>>>> Read it out to yourself. And let's be honest, it sounds 
>>>> really crap when you read "an UFCS", bahhh!
>>>
>>> Yes, well, the problem is that "an U" sounds completely fine 
>>> in my head!
>>>
>>> The way you pronounce the U letter in the English alphabet is 
>>> the same (not sure if identical) as the Russian letter Ю, 
>>> which is considered a vowel in Russian.
>>
>> In that case you'll just have to learn the rule: if it's a 
>> single letter, it has to be `an`. Sorry, I didn't realize that 
>> /j/ is treated as a vowel in Russian. I was thinking of 
>> languages I'm familiar with, and there /j/ is always treated 
>> as a consonant. Is the Russian sound a fricative or a pure 
>> vowel without any friction (= obstruction)?
>
> Can't answer that question, but <Ю> is actually [ju] in 
> isolation, that is, a glide + a vowel. When preceded by a 
> consonant, that glide is not pronounced, instead the consonant 
> gets palatalized. Thus it would be better to say that /ju/ is 
> treated as a vowel, not /j/.

Hm, a glide is not necessarily a fricative. In English the /j/ 
sometimes comes close to /ç/, as in German `ich`. A glide would 
be more like /ɪu/, however, in this environment glides tend to 
have some sort of friction, it's almost unavoidable. Interesting, 
though, how the same sounds are perceived differently in 
different languages.