Old Believers, Greta Garbo, etc.

[Daryl R Bullis]

One additional point that no one yet has offered up here: Garbo's native language was Swedish and her English was certainly accented, very heavily so early on in her "talkies" career beginning with Anna Christie (1930). Her accent improved significantly by the time she made Anna Karenina, but one thing that we may not know is anything about how she was coached to pronounce Russian names. There is no shortage of examples from American films where actors simply mangled Russian names simply because their director or diction coaches did not know any better.

Best,

Daryl Bullis

-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of mclellan at PRINCETON.EDU
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 3:11 AM
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Old Believers, Greta Garbo, etc.

One minor emendation to Jeff's good explanation.
On Feb 25, 2008, at 2:17 AM, Margarita Orlova wrote:

>> Dear Prof. Hill,
>>
>> I don't think we really need to bring Old Believers into this (as  
>> much as I would like to).
>>
>> My first guess is that the -GIJ pronunciation might just be  
>> Garbo's perception (or maybe even yours?) of the rising of  
>> stressed -é- between two soft consonants: IPA [e], perceptually  
>> between [E] (Eng. eh) and [i] (Eng. ee).  In some speakers it  
>> rises enough to be far enough even from [e] to be perceived as [i].
>>
>> Some Russian names have doublet forms: Russian (secular) Sergéi  
>> and Slavonic (church/calendrical) Sérgii (compare Tolstoy's "Otets  
>> Sergii", not Sergei).  We also have Alekséi/Aléksii and Andréi/ 
>> Ándrii.  Old Believers have their baptismal names from the church  
>> calendar, but they (at least those Old Believers in Poland,  
>> Lithuania, Latvia, and the US with whom I work) usually use  
>> secular forms (and usually diminutives of those) in daily use.   
>> (And some--especially in the US--are given secular names that have  
>> little or nothing to do with their baptismal names.)  If Garbo  
>> were using a church form (which would be strange), then the stress  
>> would be on the first syllable, not on the second (ser-GIJ), as  
>> you have indicated.
>>

Such doublets exist in many places across the Church Slavonic/ 
vernacular Russian divide.  Sergej (stress on 2nd syllable) and  
Sergij (stress on first syllable) are reported accurately.  The CS  
counterpart to Aleksej, however, Aleksij, has stress on the third  
syllable, just as Aleksej does.  Although some Russian speakers  
pronounce the name of the present Patriarch of Moscow with stress on  
the second syllable, no one who attends church regularly does so,  
since it is clearly pronounced with stress on the third syllable at  
every service, and even though that could be due to this  
pronunciation being merely an accepted error (as can be heard when  
untrained readers attempt Church Slavonic), the stress is clearly  
marked on the third syllable in the menaion services to saints with  
the name.

If you have ever wondered why you have never heard of a "Father (or  
Bishop) Ivan," the Russian/Church Slavonic duality is the reason.  A  
boy Vanja grows up to be a man Ivan, but when he is ordained, he  
becomes otec Ioann.

Andrej is identical in Russian and (contemporary, Russian recension)  
Church Slavonic; Andrij I have heard only as the Ukrainian form of  
the same name.

In the end, I wonder if the pronunciation Prof. Hill cites was not  
Garbo's idiosyncrasy.  Just tonight someone forwarded to me the  
following URL for a YouTube video of the only performance of its kind  
I have ever seen of a Church Slavonic prayer.  Surely this  
pronunciation was also the result of someone's idiosyncratic  
understanding of the transliteration.  But the singing is excellent,  
if not exactly traditional for the genre.  FYI:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reB9TxoBgSY

With best wishes,
Frank McLellan

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