[w] for [v] in the speech of Russians speaking English

[Francoise Rosset]

Funny you should mention Star Trek.

Yes, Mr. Chekhov did make this particular "mistake." The actor in the
original series was NOT Russian.
The actor in the current movies, Anton Yelchin, is Russian, and boy, does
he sound it; the accent -- not his own-- is "perfect. "

Interestingly, he thought the V and W business was just the previous actor:
"I know the Russian accent so well because I have so many family members
and family friends who speak with one, but there are also certain things
that Walter Koenig does specifically, like his version of it, that I have
been picking up and studying to incorporate, because I think they're really
important. It really is Chekov. It's not just some Russian guy. It's
Chekov. Specifically the word 'very'. He says 'wery'. It's a W instead of a
V. And the way he says 'keptin'... All these things, I think, are important
to take note of and use."

Thank you to Dorian Juric for clarifying that it does happen naturally ...

-FR





On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Paul B. Gallagher <
paulbg at pbg-translations.com> wrote:

> Brian Hayden wrote:
>
>> Dear SEELANGers,
>>
>> The pronunciation of one Russian in this broadcast (
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?**v=aH41sond7HA<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH41sond7HA>) has me a little puzzled.
>> Around 3:14 she pronounces (as far as I can tell) the first consonant of
>> "very" more or less like an English speaker would, but then around 3:42
>> she says something that might be either "very" or "wery", and then a few
>> seconds later she says "very" again, but definitely replaces the [v]
>> sound with a [w] sound.
>>
>> This strikes me as strange for several reasons:
>> 1) she doesn't replace [v] with [w] everywhere -- she didn't when she
>> was speaking more quickly around 3:14
>> 2) standard Russian doesn't even have a [w] phoneme
>> 3) this doesn't seem to be an especially common mispronunciation among
>> Russians. Having done quite a bit of English tutoring with Russians,
>> there are a few places where almost everyone I tutored had some issues
>> -- pronouncing the first vowel and /r/ of "Thursday" or "her" like «ёр»
>> ("I will tell хёр") comes to mind. That makes sense to me; Russian
>> doesn't have a sound exactly like the "ur" in "Thursday", so
>> Russian-speakers substitute it with the closest thing they have. But
>> here Russians have the same [v] sound as English-speakers do, but
>> nevertheless it seems that a Russian-speaker is replacing it with a
>> sound that is foreign to standard Russian.
>>
>> Can someone explain to me what's really happening here?
>>
>
> Language learners go through several phases as they acquire new sounds.
> Don't assume that this one has only the Russian inventory -- she may be in
> the process of acquiring /w/. "Mr. Chekhov" on the original Star Trek
> series sounds like this, too.
>
> In that case, an L2 speaker with sketchy /w/ will produce a variety of
> sounds approximating /w/, and be inconsistent in their usage (often
> pronouncing the same word variably). So one intermediate phase will be that
> /v/ prevails but /w/ occurs occasionally, and not always where appropriate.
> As proficiency increases, /w/ is pronounced more accurately and used more
> appropriately, and in the end, it is pronounced well and used exactly where
> it should be.
>
> --
> 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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-- 
Françoise Rosset
Chair, Russian and Russian Studies
Wheaton College, Norton MA 02766
office:     508-286-3696
FAX #:     508-286-3640
frosset at wheatonma.edu

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