you who ate the cookie?") – (Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – (Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. Phonology The phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic; it underwent considerable modification in the early historical period before being largely settled around the year 1400. The language possesses five vowels (or six, under the St.Petersburg Phonological School), which are written with different letters depending on whether the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. The hard consonants are often velarized, especially before front vowels, as in Irish and Marshallese. The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa. (See also: vowel reduction in Russian.) The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using a formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) However, Russian has a constraint on syllabification such that syllables cannot span multiple morphemes. Clusters of four consonants are not very common, especially within a morpheme. Some examples are: ( vzglyad, 'glance'), ( gosudarstv, 'of the states'), ( stroitelstv, 'of the constructions'). Consonants Russian is notable for its distinction based on palatalization of most of its consonants. While do have true palatalized allophones , only might be considered a phoneme, though it is marginal and generally not considered distinctive. The only native minimal pair that argues for being a separate phoneme is ( eto tkyot – "it weaves") (, etot kot – "this cat"). The phoneme // is generally considered to be always hard; however, loan words such as Цюрих and some other neologisms contain // through the word-building processes (e.g. фрицёнок, шпицята). Palatalization means that the center of the tongue is raised during and after the articulation of the consonant. In the case of and , the tongue is raised enough to produce slight frication (affricate sounds; cf. Belarusian ць, дзь, or Polish ć, dź). The sounds are dental, that is, pronounced with the tip of the tongue against