transliteration - Ukrainian & Russian to English

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Margarita Orlova wrote:

> I prefer foreigners to acquire the Northern pronunciation:) Otherwise
> they sound exaggerating like if they were the "litsa kavkazskoj
> natsional'nosti". (If you understand what i am talking about;)

I understand the bigotry that exists in Russian culture (we have our own 
shameful counterparts), but I was just having some fun with a reductio 
ad absurdum. The akanye was incidental; my main point was about using 
"ff" to indicate final devoicing.

> I am talking about a phonemic pronunciation being more natural than
> exaggerating use of allophones when the speaker has a wrong
> implication that they are real phonemes, just because they are
> expressed with letters.

It's one thing if you're trying to teach someone to speak the language, 
with all the various grammatical forms; it's another if you're teaching 
a foreigner with no aspirations for more to pronounce one name correctly 
in his own language. An English speaker is perfectly capable of 
pronouncing final /v/, but a Russian is not, so I wouldn't teach my 
American colleagues to do something the Russian cannot.

О вкусе, конечно, не спорят...

-- 
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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