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

[J P Maher]

Agreed, except that "between you and I" is a hypercorrection , not polyglot, but within monglot Anglophones. jpm
 

________________________________
 From: Charles Mills <bowrudder at GMAIL.COM>
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU 
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2013 11:02 AM
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] [w] for [v] in the speech of Russians speaking English
  


In my experience, this phenomenon is more widespread than you describe it.  I've encountered it a lot.  Many phonologists view Russian as having /w/ at the grammatical level, realized as either [v] or [f] (Lightner, Harshenin, Coats, Kiparsky, Hayes).  If that is true, it could be that they just haven't assimilated the grammar of L2.  Overcompensation could be the phonological analog of speakers who use "I" where they should use "me"; they know "w" is correct.  They just don't know when. 



On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 8:01 AM, Simon Beattie <simon at simonbeattie.co.uk> wrote:

Some German speakers certainly do this when speaking English.  Though I have always presumed it was some kind of hypercorrection on their part: they perhaps automatically pronounce a written w as [v], as in German, but they also know that [w] exists in English, so use it when they see the letter v. 
>  
>Simon 
>  
>  
>From:SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Brian Hayden
>Sent: 17 September 2013 15:28
>To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
>Subject: [SEELANGS] [w] for [v] in the speech of Russians speaking English 
>  
>Dear SEELANGers, 
>   
>The pronunciation of one Russian in this broadcast ( 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?  
>   
>Sincerely,  
>   
>Brian Hayden   
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