taking poll on pronunciation

[Kim Braithwaite]

These are certainly valid points to ponder, persuasively argued.

"Good is better than evil, because it's Nicer - Mammy Yokum (Al Capp)
Mr Kim Braithwaite, Translator
Russian and Georgian

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From: "Paul B. Gallagher" <paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM>
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2010 1:30 PM
To: <SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu>
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] taking poll on pronunciation

> Kim Braithwaite wrote:
>
>> These occasional exchanges about how non-Russians speaking
>> non-Russian ought to pronounce this or that Russian proper name are
>> revealing and often amusing. Some Russianists seem to be sticklers
>> for saying it the way Russians say it.
>
> My general approach is to do the best I can to imitate the source language 
> with the target-language tools available. English doesn't have tone, so we 
> can't mimic Chinese tones, nor does it have phonemic palatalization, so we 
> can't simulate the быт/быть contrast (though some Americans will say 
> bit/beech as a rough first attempt). But we're pretty good at controlling 
> stress placement, and our stress looks an awful lot like Russian stress 
> (louder, longer, clearer) and not much like the Czech or Japanese pitch 
> accents.
>
>> I agree that the natural impulse of English speakers speaking English
>> (me, for example) is to say BoroDIno, and frankly it does not offend
>> me. I do doubt that it's by analogy with e.g. Tarantino, or for that
>> matter Arizona. Phonologists can probably explain it.
>
> Probably.
>
> I don't mind that monolingual nonspecialists guess wrong from the spelling 
> of Russian names. I have a higher standard for Slavicists and speakers of 
> Russian. And I count myself in that group, so I allow myself no excuses 
> for getting them wrong.
>
>> What about Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians (for example)? According to 
>> textbook descriptions, Czech and Hungarian have a rigid stress pattern on 
>> the first syllable - hence, presumably, BOrodino. And Polish has a rigid 
>> stress pattern on the penultimate - hence, presumably, BoroDIno. But 
>> maybe their intellectuals and diplomats, or radio and TV announcers, 
>> break their native stress rules in deference to the way Russians say it. 
>> I'd really like to find out, in case someone on SEELANGS knows.
>
> I would think languages with fixed accent placement or no special accent 
> at all would react differently than languages with movable stress like 
> English. Here we do have general rules and patterns to help us guess the 
> placement in unfamiliar words, but there are numerous exceptions, so much 
> so that the English speaker is capable of moving the stress around if s/he 
> is so inclined. Not so for a Pole or a Czech.
>
>> Of course there's those tricky akanie vowel gradations too, which those 
>> languages do not share - nor, for that matter, does Ukrainian. On the 
>> other hand, Belorussian/Belarusan not only pronounces it BaradziNO but 
>> actually spells it Барадзiно (I hope my Unicode Cyrillic comes through). 
>> That -dz- affrication is an additional curious feature of Belarusan.
>>
>> Suppose we do teach Americans to stress the final syllable: -NO. After 
>> that, the vowel gradations? Uh-uh. Achieve BorodiNO and quit while we're 
>> ahead.
>
> Three unstressed syllables building toward a climax in the final syllable 
> is very un-English, I agree. But the vowel gradations are doable --  
> Buh-ruh-dee-NAW is feasible even if it sounds quite foreign (and 
> realistically, a Russian name /should/ sound foreign, shouldn't it?). The 
> English speaker will want a secondary stress on the first or second 
> syllable, more likely the second for metric regularity.
>
> I agree that perfect Russian pronunciation is too much to expect from 
> non-Russian speakers. But parts of it are very doable.
>
> -- 
> 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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