the good old days, and that pesky letter "shee" (formerly "shch")

[John Dunn]

S.I. Kotkov (Moskovskaja rech' v nachal'nyj period stanovlenija russkogo natsional'nogo jazyka, M., 1974, pp. 180-82) considered that the shsh pronunciation was current in 17th-century Moscow, while the 1983 edition of Avanesov's Orfoepicheskij slovar' russkogo jazyka describes the shch pronunciation as going out of use [выходит из употребления] (p. 669 in the 1985 reprinting).  Which brings me to the question: how many people even in St Petersburg still use 'shch'?  Certainly I haven't noticed it among those natives of that city that currently occupy the summit of the greasy pole. 

It may also be worth noting that Russian is not the only language that suffers from the teaching of obsolescent pronunciations.  It would seem that in Russia (and elsewhere) students learning the specifically British pronunciation of English are still taught to pronounce words such as 'back' with a front vowel, even though no-one in Britain, apart perhaps from certain members of the Royal Family and a few elderly ladies in the wealthier suburbs of Edinburgh, has used that pronunciation for fifty years or more.

John Dunn.




John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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