I have been studying about Russian phonology and its phonemes and I wanted to ask a question: are there any minimal pairs between [ɨ] and [i] or are they just allophonic variations of the phoneme /i/?
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Depends on what you mean. Do you accept that the distinction between palatalized and non-palatalized consonants is phonemic? (As far as I know, this is not controversial in general, but someone in the comments to a past question seemed to dispute it: linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/14629/…)– brass tacksJan 23, 2018 at 1:46
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Now I see that they are not different phonemes as I previously thought, but they are allophonic variations of /i/ occurring in contexts influenced by the preceding consonant, depending on whether it is palatalized or not. Thanks for sharing that link with me :)– Redwars22Jan 23, 2018 at 1:52
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1See also on Russian SE Is there a word that starts with “ы”?, What is the difference between ы and и?– brass tacksJan 23, 2018 at 2:07
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I have asked a question on Russian SE to clarify my confusion about where [ji] occurs in the language; you may be interested in the answers (when it gets some): Where does the sound “йи” / iotated и occur in Russian?– brass tacksJan 23, 2018 at 3:09
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The term "minimal pair" means "pair of words distinguished only by the selection of a single phone". As far as I know there is a single minimal pair, икать "to pronounce unstressed е (je) as и (i), the Standard Russian pronunciation, rather than as е (je)" versus ыкать "to make the sound of the letter ы". Otherwise, there are no minimal pairs, because the vowel distinction simultaneously correlates with the preceding consonant ([i] iff preceding C is palatalized). There is a chicken-egg question there, so it is still possible that [ɨ] is an allophone of /i/ appearing after a non-palatalized consonant. Minimal pairs are based on distribution of phones in the surface transcription, and the surface transcription is supposed to reflect the phonetic facts, not the phonological analysis based on those facts (that would be obviously circular). Apart from that verb pair, there are non-Slavic place names with initial Ы, but there would not be any minimal pairs involving such words.
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Note that both words in the minimal pair have the stress on the first syllable. One of them has a homograph икáть (to hiccup) which is much more common in speach, but does not contribute to a minimal pair because of the different accentuation.– J-msterJan 23, 2018 at 13:22
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@Wilson: After consonants that do not palatalize, there is a neutralization. The neutralized phone is generally identified with [ɨ], but as far as I know it is not quite as back as [ɨ] after consonants that do have palatalized counterparts. It is usually written with the letter "и", though. After "ь", I don't think [ɨ] ever occurs. The sequence ьи seems to be pronounced [ji]. Jan 23, 2018 at 16:19
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@Wilson: To be more explicit, the vowel is identified with [ɨ] after back consonants that do not palatalize: [ʂ], [ʐ], [t͡s], but identified with [i] after the always-palatalized consonants [t͡ɕ] and [ɕː]--as might be expected. See on Russian SE russian.stackexchange.com/questions/528/… It certainly seems to be accurate to say that a phonemic distinction between /ɨ/ and /i/ is marginal to nonexistent. Jan 23, 2018 at 16:29