I'm looking for the pronunciation of the word слезы (tears). On forvo.com both spellings слезы and слёзы are listed and pronounced differently. Is the meaning the same in both cases and how/why do they differ?
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They're pronounced exactly the same way because it's the exact same word. The usage of the letter "ё" from the very beginning of its existence (it was introduced in the late 18th century) was quite controversial and almost never obligatory.
That leads to this double spelling. In some cases it eventually affected the way we pronounce some words (nobody says Рёрих nowadays. Another very famous example is "свекла"/"cвёкла"), but this never happened with "слёзы", which obeys the regular rules of pronouncing words with "ё" ("йо" at the beginning of a word; palatalization of preceding consonant plus "о" anywhere else).
Keep in mind, though, that the singular form, "слеза" is correct without "ё", the same, for instance, as with "звезда"/"звёзды".
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2Я не увидел ни единой слезы – Elena Jan 04 '19 at 17:11
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@Elena that's singular and it mentioned in answer – shabunc Jan 04 '19 at 17:12
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@Elena, a namesake? Why does the site allow this phenomenon... – Elena Jan 04 '19 at 17:16
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@Elena, probably the site 'thinks' that the identification = name + avatar. But the avatar is not visible in the comments and this can lead to misunderstandings. – Elena Jan 04 '19 at 17:30
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The phrase "which are pronounced differently" in the question makes me think that we are dealing with genitive "слезы" here rather than е/ё interchanging. – Alexander Jan 04 '19 at 18:46
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@Alexander I suggest that by слёзы/слезы pronounced differently was meant exactly the fact that those are different spellings that seemingly supposed to be pronounced differently. Of course, only the author can clarify. – shabunc Jan 04 '19 at 18:47
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@shabunc this might be the case, but imho unlikely, because plural pronunciation "слезы" is very archaic now. On the other hand, singular genitive "слезы" is perfectly mainstream. – Alexander Jan 04 '19 at 18:51
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Alexander it's about spelling, not pronunciation (and to my knowledge it never was pronounced that way in plural) – shabunc Jan 04 '19 at 18:53
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@shabunc you are wrong, it was. The stress was on the first syllable. We have this form in Church-Slavonic texts. – Elena Jan 04 '19 at 20:52
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@Elena well, I might be wrong, but in my knowledge in Russian it was never a case (and Church-Slavonic is a different language) – shabunc Jan 04 '19 at 21:02
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@shabunc ))))) never say never, I gave it as an example of where we can still hear this outdated phenomenon. Besides, we can find it in literature, but it takes time to find a quote. – Elena Jan 04 '19 at 22:17
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The answer can be traced through the question.
It means, слезы is the Genitive case singular,
and слёзы is the Nominative case plural. This word, as you can see from the previous answer, can be written without dots above е, but it retains the ё-pronunciation.
Elena
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