Vowels in Russian Language
and their analogs in other languages
Similarly to many other languages, Russian also has its own and perhaps unique system of sounds. Here we consider the stressed vowels of the Russian language.
There are 10 stressed vowels in the Russian language. They can be symmetrically organized in 5 pairs representing 5 "basic" vowels. The "basic" vowel does not exist itself in a pure form, its appearance depends on the cuttent position instead. A pair represents two appearances of a "basic" imaginary vowel, hard and soft, i.e. in positions after hard and soft consonants correspondingly.
The 5 Russian pairs (Cyrillic script) are the following,
у/ю
о/ё
а/я
э/е
ы/и
Note. Here we do not consider Russian vowels in the beginning of words and after stops (hard and soft signs, Ъ and Ь in Russian) where the pronounced vowels are automatically merged with the preceeding j-sound (in IPA notation). In these situations, the resulting sound can be easily composed as j-sound followed by the first vowel of a pair.
Then, among the West European languages, the most (9 of 10) analogs of the Russian stressed vowels seem to be found in the German language. The 5 corresponding German pairs (Latin script for German language) are the following,
u/ü
o/ö
a/a2
ä/e
/i
Note. a2 is the soft a-sound appearing after the soft consonant L in German words like "klein".
The remaining, 10-th Russian ы-sound is not shown in the above, German-based table. And it can be hardly be found in other West European languages. However it exists in Eastern languages, for example, in Korean. With using Hangul (Korean script), this vowel is written as a long horizontal line (similar to minus-sign).
The resulting table of Russian vowels and their analongs in two other languages may look like follows,
у/ю
о/ё
а/я
э/е
ы/и
u/ü
o/ö
a/a2
ä/e
-/i
where almost all vowels in the bottom row are German (90%) excepting the one (Korean, 10%), which is drawn in red.