Ukrainian phonology

A small group of verbs which do not shift for aspect and have е in their stems bear stress on the inflection.

[2] The unstressed vowel allophones are as follows:[3] In the table above, whenever two consonants share a cell, the one to the left is voiceless, while the one to the right is voiced.

The exceptions are легко, вогко, нігті, кігті, дьогтю, дігтяр, and their derivatives: /ɦ/ may then be devoiced to [h] or even merge with /x/.

Historically, contrasting unpalatalized and palatalized articulations of consonants before /i/ were possible and more common, with the absence of palatalization usually reflecting that regular sound changes in the language made an /i/ vowel actually evolve from an older, non-palatalizing /ɔ/ vowel.

[11] While the labial consonants /m, p, b, f, w/ cannot be phonemically palatalized, they can still precede one of the iotating vowels є і ьо ю я, when many speakers replace the would-be sequences *|mʲ, pʲ, bʲ, fʲ, wʲ| with the consonant clusters /mj, pj, bj, fj, wj/, a habit also common in nearby Polish.

[11] The separation of labial consonants from /j/ is already hard-coded in many Ukrainian words (and written as such with an apostrophe), such as in В'ячеслав /wjat͡ʃɛˈslaw/ "Vyacheslav", ім'я /iˈmja/ "name" and п'ять /pjatʲ/ "five".

[citation needed] The combinations of labials with iotating vowels are written without the apostrophe after consonants in the same morpheme, e.g. свято /ˈsʲw(j)atɔ/ "holiday", цвях "nail" (but зв'язок "union", where з- is a prefix), and in some loanwords, e. g. бюро "bureau".

Thus, words like свято /ˈsʲw(j)atɔ/ "holiday" and сват /swat/ "matchmaker" retain their separate pronunciations (whether or not an actual /j/ is articulated).