Labov

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, when I was a student at the old Army Language School in 1960,
one of our prepodavateli, gospodin Pal'chikov, the self-proclaimed
"Staryi Soldat," said that, though it was possible to stress _Petrov_
on the leftmost syllable, that pronunciation, in effect, lacked balls.
Placing the stress on the rightmost syllable sounded far more manly.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain





On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:45 PM, Victor <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Victor <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Labov
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If one really wants to go to the source, he should consider that unlike
> English-speaking users, the Russians *always* pronounce "Romanov" with a
> stress on the second syllable and "never" on the first. There is also a
> significant difference between how the name of the Russian writer is
> usually pronounced and how the name of Walter Koenig's character on Star
> Trek is pronounced. The former (with a "kh" in the middle) I usually
> hear with a stress on the first syllable, similarly, but not identically
> to how the Russians would have pronounced it. The latter (with the
> "k")--at least, to my ear--is pronounced on the show with nearly equal
> stress on both syllables.
>
> But I also want to dispel the myth that Russian "-ov" names cannot have
> stress on the ultimate syllable. The most obvious example is
> "Komarov"--a name that should be familiar to those growing up in the
> 1960s (or those familiar with the Soviet space program). It is not even
> true that Slavic names with two syllables always stress the first. A
> common Russian and Bulgarian name is Popov which, for reasons I shall
> never understand, many English speakers pronounce literally the same
> name as the combination "pop off". This has no resemblance to the
> original source which also has stress on the ultimate syllable (for two
> examples, there is currently a top Bulgarian soccer/football player with
> that name and there used to be a top Soviet clown with the same
> surname). Several hockey players currently (or recently) in the NHL also
> demonstrate this--Petrov, Titov (also the name of "Cosmonavt 2"--the
> player's father) and Kozlov all have ultimate stress.
>
> So there is nothing in Slavic, particularly in Russian, names that
> restricts the stress in a manner that would ultimately prevent "Labov"
> from having stress on the second syllable. Now, as a speaker, I would
> have naturally stress the first syllable, had I not been told otherwise.
> I don't have a hard and fast rule for this, but, I am sure, one can be
> found. But it will not be due to a simple blanket proscription.
>
> Â  Â VS-)
>
> RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>> This has alwas seemed most unnatural to me. I've always assumed that the -ov
>> is a Slavic ending, and as such it would rhyme more with with "Dog" than
>> "stove." tNo one would pronounce "Romanov" or "Chekov" and rhyme the last syllable
>> Â rhyme with "hove" or the past tense of "dive."
>>
>
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