Heard on the Olympics broadcast (OT: Russian pronunciation)

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

This isn't teribly important for this list, but anyway:
 
In Russian there's what's called "akan'e" ("o" right before the stress becomes /a/; this is standard in Russian) and "okan'e" ("o" right before the stress remains /o/; IIRC, this is limited to some North Russian dialects).
 
In the case of the Russian word for "she" ("ona"), there are two reasons to pronounce the "o" as /a/ in standard Russian: 1) This "o" appears right before the stressed vowel, and 2) word-initial "o" is always pronounced as /a/ unless it's stressed.
 
Gerald Cohen
 
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From:  Mark Mandel, Mon 8/11/2008 1:51 PM

They do, in unstressed syllables: /a/ -> [^] or schwa. <ona>  ->  /^'na/.

m a m

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 11:05 AM, <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:
>
> In a message dated 8/10/08 6:27:46 PM, ronbutters at AOL.COM writes:
>
>
> > Well da, konyeshno. And when the Russians refer to a female they say "ana."
> >
> Or "ona" if they don't have a/o merger.

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