transliteration - Ukrainian & Russian to English

[Francoise Rosset]

On Thu, 6 May 2010 10:23:18 +0100
  anne marie devlin <anne_mariedevlin at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
> just an observation - but isn't ff used to indicate final devoicing 
>for French native speakers?
> 

Yup, but it doesn't change Paul's point about rendering the actual 
pronunciation of the ending.
Many Russian émigrés ended up in France. I have American students of
Russian descent in my classes, several of them acquired the -off
somewhere sometime.
  
Russians in Germany would have had no problem with a final devoiced 
-OB
rendered as -OV since that IS the German pronunciation of that letter
-- which brings up instead the potential reverse problem of an initial 
Russian "B" rendered as V and left up to the German imagination. 
Initial V in German is pretty much also pronounced F (Vater, Volk, 
Volkswagen). In Germany Kandinsky's first name often ended up with an 
initial W and two SSs: Wassily.

So the question is, when Anglophones without any knowledge of Russian
see the final -OB rendered as -OV, will they pronounce it correctly as
(devoiced) -OFF?
-OV can and will result in its being pronounced -OV, with a voiced V 
sound.
-OF may result in the same (... say the preposition "of" by itself)

So Paul's posting, however facetious it may otherwise be, has a point.
The only way to ENSURE a devoiced -OB may be -OFF.

That is, of course, assuming that our main goal is to ensure a fully 
devoiced ending, which is a separate issue. Official transliteration 
is about rendering letters and spelling more than actual sound.
-FR




Francoise Rosset, Associate Professor
Chair, Russian and Russian Studies
Coordinator, German and Russian
Wheaton College
Norton, Massachusetts 02766
Office: (508) 285-3696
FAX:   (508) 286-3640

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