medved' and Medvedev

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Alina Israeli wrote:

> Certainly affricated, but we are aiming for dz, not dj (as in job).

Yes, American "j" is hard, closer to дж than to дзь, even in words like 
"Jewish" and "juniper" where British has a yod or something close to it.

Emily Saunders wrote:

> It seems to me that we are straying from the point -- which is to get
> native English speakers with no knowledge of Russian phonetics to
> give a fairly good approximation of correct pronunciation of a
> foreign name without having to give them a lecture on soft
> consonants. 

I agree on the target, and I would add that the judges are native 
speakers of Russian -- if they are more satisfied, then the 
pronunciation in question is "better."

> At any rate, the point of my long-winded anecdote is to illustrate
> that with this sort of request you've got to forget what you know and
> think like someone who knows nothing about Russian. Quibbling over
> whether we're allowing palatalization because it's in the original or
> the exact partitioning of syllables is a bit beside the point. Get an
> English speaker to read what you've got back to you and you'll
> quickly find out how close you are. Some of the better
> transliterations for "dummies" are some of the more heinous looking
> to the experts. My guess is that if you read "Mid-VAY-dyiff" with
> your broadest American accent showing, it'll be fairly close, even if
> someone mistakenly puts an extra syllable in the last one.

Well, if the Russians here have heard what a monolingual English speaker 
says for "Mid-VAY-dyiff" and like it better than what a monolingual 
English speaker says for "Mid-VED-iff," you win.

"Quibbling over palatalization" etc. is an indirect way of predicting 
which spellings are likely to yield good results, but I agree that no 
amount of guesswork beats actual field data. I look forward to reading 
the results of our colleagues' investigations.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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