Phonemes /e/ and /ê/ in the borrowed stems in Southern and Central Russian dialects

In Russian dialects with the distinction of phonemes /e/ and /ê/ both of these phonemes can reflect the stressed vowel e of the etymons in the stems of borrowings, one of them being usually assigned to a certain stem. The paper considers about 200 lexemes taken from the dialect records of the early XX — XXI centuries made in the surroundings of Ryazan, Zadonsk and Staryj Oskol. Most of them are borrowings from Western
European languages through the medium of standard Russian in its professional and official varieties; about a quarter of lexemes are borrowed from Church Slavonic, most of them are personal names; a few words represent borrowings from Yiddish and from some Finno-Ugric source. The data describes the situation in Russian dialects to the southeast and east of Moscow, which is characterized by the unity of the principles of vocalization of borrowed stems. The ‘unmarked’ way of substituting the accented e in the etymons is the phoneme /e/. However, in the fragments of stems which, occurring in several lexemes, look like suffixes (due to their morphonological structure and the position in the stem), the stressed e is replaced by the phoneme /ê/. Such suffix-like fragments of the stems are -êt, -êr, -êj in masculine nouns, -êt-a, -têk-a, -êr-a, -r-êl-a (< -l-êr-a),
-êl-ь, -êj-а in feminine nouns. The only suffix-like fragment where the phoneme /e/ stands for e of the etymons is -ent. The northern dialects, judging by fragmentary data, are similar to the southeastern dialects when it comes to Church Slavonicisms and differ from them in regard to the vocabulary borrowed from Western European languages. The variation of /e/ and /ě/ in one stem is relatively rare and may partly be due to the
ideas of the dialect speakers about the standard pronunciation and correct reading of the letter ‘e’. Educated speakers of dialects believe that the proper reading of the letter ‘e’ is the phoneme /e/ of their dialects; and that the phoneme /e/ of the standard language corresponds to the phoneme /e/ (monophthong) in their dialects, while the phoneme /ê/ (diphthong) is specifically dialectal.