Anglo mis-stressing

[Gerald Janecek]

For what it's worth, I did a study of stress patterns in connection  
with zaum' and discovered that there is a statistical tendency  
(stress entropy, if you will) toward the first syllable in English  
and toward the middle syllable in Russian.  This doesn't explain all  
the peculiarities, where analogy may play a part, but it seems to be  
connected with English's monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon roots versus the  
agglutinative structure of Russian words, where the root tends to be  
in the middle, surrounded by prefixes and suffixes.  Just a  
hypothesis, but it explains VLAdimir in English and marKEting in  
Russian.

Jerry Janecek

On May 10, 2007, at 10:08 PM, Emily Saunders wrote:

> Not having studied the stress patterns of my native language, I  
> can't really comment on the "mis-stressing" of Russian names by  
> anglo-speakers, but I have noticed some common errors in the  
> opposite direction:
>
> DZHEEP CheROkee
> SuBAru FoRESter
>
> being two of my favorites.   (Though I have been told that SuBAru  
> is the original Japanese pronunciation and that we anglo-speakers  
> have that one wrong while the Russians have it right.)
>
> And there are more, but I can't think of any offhand.  At any rate  
> I would say that butchering the pronunciation of foreign words is  
> common across all languages and is not something culturally  
> specific to one linguistic group.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Emily Saunders
>
> P.S.  To the previous list of commonly mispronounced Russian words  
> I'd also add baBUSHka and VLADiVOStok (two stressed syllables and  
> neither of them the right one...)
>
> On May 10, 2007, at 3:50 PM, George Kalbouss wrote:
>
>> The discussion on the pronunciation of Kluev has led me to wonder  
>> out loud about a
>> phenomenon that I have been patiently putting up with lo these 60  
>> years, namely, how
>> Anglo-speakers seem to have a talent to rarely guess where the  
>> stress should go on
>> a Russian name.
>>
>> 	Some of the worst mis-stresses I can figure out.  MiKHAIL becomes  
>> "Mick-HALE"
>> because it looks like that, and DACHa is stressed correctly but  
>> the pronunciation is
>> DAKHA (not the way the word actually looks) because an analogy,  
>> for some unknown
>> reason, is made with the concentration camp, Dachau.
>>
>> 	Others, however, make me wonder -- and perhaps some linguist  
>> colleagues can
>> help out -- is there an overriding principle in the English  
>> language or culture why this
>> butchering is done?  Some of the more common examples:
>>
>> 	VLAdimir
>> 	PavLOVa
>> 	SharaPOva  (she finally gave in and said, ok, that's my name)
>> 	Ki-EV
>> 	TOLstoy
>> 	LerMONTov  (I doubt the pronouncers have heard of Learmont)
>> 	KHRUSHchev
>> 	TURD-jenev
>> 	LeNEEN, StaLEEN  (yes, despite the notoriety of these names)
>> 	StolichNAYA  (the escape route is STOLi,  not StoLI).
>>
>> In exasperation, I tell my Anglo speakers, just decide where you  
>> want to put the stress and
>> then move it one to the right.  If you think the stress should go  
>> on the last syllable, then put
>> it on the first.  At least I increase the probablity of getting it  
>> right.
>>
>> 	As a consolation, they get BLOK and TVER right the first time.
>>
>> 	Then, there's Nemerovich-Danchenko,  Dnepropetrovsk and  
>> Petrodvorets.-- maybe we're
>> asking too much.
>>
>> George Kalbouss
>> (The) Ohio State University
>>
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Gerald Janecek, Professor of Russian
gjanecek at uky.edu
Dept. of Modern & Classical Languages
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506

Editor, Slavic & East European Journal
seej at uky.edu





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