Do hard vowels after ч and щ really become their 'iotated' equivalents?

Question

I was reading a reputable textbook (A Comprehensive Russian Grammar) to revisit my fairly shaky knowledge of pronunciation, and the book claimed that:

The vowels а, о, and у are in practice pronounced as [ja], [jo], and [ju] following these consonants [ie ч and щ].

It then gave some examples, eg час (hour), which apparently should be phonetically rendered чяс. I was immediately doubtful and conducted research on Wiktionary and Forvo. Both sites informed me that the pronunciation was indeed час, as I had suspected. (I also tested this with other consonant-vowel combinations and the sites confirmed to me the same result).

I may be missing something here, and I suspect that the textbook is retaining a somewhat obsolete pronunciation that native speakers don't tend to practice, but I don't want to learn an incorrect pronunciation. Is the pronunciation of such vowels after ч and щ indeed iotated (ie with an added 'y' at the start) or is the consonant before simply soft, as I might have expected?

Thanks anyway for any help - much appreciated

Answer 1

I'm not a linguist - and also believe that questions like yours are better to be asked at Linguistics Stack however I believe that the answer to your question would be no.

While pronunciation of particular vowel is affected by lot of factors, in a simplified world of practical Russian language learning you can accept following statement: vowel is not iotated by preceding consonant.

We should separate following facts:

• In Russian most of consonants exist in two forms, hard and soft (palatalized)
• Russian consonants "ч", "щ" are nevertheless always soft.
• Russian consonants "ж", "ц" and "ш" are always hard.
• Russian letters "я", "ю", "е" are iotated at the beginning of the words or at the start of the root in compound words and after vowels. And by iotated, we mean that they are pronounced "йа", "йу", and "йэ" correspondingly.
• After consonants this letters just designate palatalization of such consonants - we should not confuse such palatalization with iotation.
• For reasons that are out of scope of this answer, after soft vowels "ч" and "щ" we write "а" (like in "чаща"), "у" (like in "чудо") but still "е".

If we had have written "чяща" or "чюдо" it would have still pronounced the same way - we don't have vowel alterations like, say umlaut. For instance, consider two spellings, correct one, "тёмный" and ungrammatical spelling "тьомный" - they will be pronounced the same way - it's not like "ё" is pronounced like German "ö".

In fact, iotated pronunciation of vowels after soft consonants is associated with a stereotypical pronunciation of foreign speakers who do not have enough experience with soft consonants. "Который чйас" is the way westerners are talking in Russian movies.

Answer 2

The vowels а, о, and у are in practice pronounced as [ja], [jo], and [ju] following these consonants [ie ч and щ].

As a native speaker I find this statement rather questionable.

Fully "iotating" а, о, у right after ч would change the sound too much and may make it hard to understand the following word. Compare чья vs ча(сто), чьё vs чо(порный), чью vs чу(вство). Changing sounds like that is actually often used to mock foreigners speaking Russian.

In combination witn щ this duality doesn't exist as far as I can think of. Hard "iotation" would still sound foreign, but to some degree a partial iotation can be perceived there, probably due to the soft sound of the preceding щ.