Anglo mis-stressing
Gerald Janecek
gjanecek at UKY.EDU
Fri May 11 18:29:00 UTC 2007
For what it's worth, I did a study of stress patterns in connection
with zaum' and discovered that there is a statistical tendency
(stress entropy, if you will) toward the first syllable in English
and toward the middle syllable in Russian. This doesn't explain all
the peculiarities, where analogy may play a part, but it seems to be
connected with English's monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon roots versus the
agglutinative structure of Russian words, where the root tends to be
in the middle, surrounded by prefixes and suffixes. Just a
hypothesis, but it explains VLAdimir in English and marKEting in
Russian.
Jerry Janecek
On May 10, 2007, at 10:08 PM, Emily Saunders wrote:
> Not having studied the stress patterns of my native language, I
> can't really comment on the "mis-stressing" of Russian names by
> anglo-speakers, but I have noticed some common errors in the
> opposite direction:
>
> DZHEEP CheROkee
> SuBAru FoRESter
>
> being two of my favorites. (Though I have been told that SuBAru
> is the original Japanese pronunciation and that we anglo-speakers
> have that one wrong while the Russians have it right.)
>
> And there are more, but I can't think of any offhand. At any rate
> I would say that butchering the pronunciation of foreign words is
> common across all languages and is not something culturally
> specific to one linguistic group.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Emily Saunders
>
> P.S. To the previous list of commonly mispronounced Russian words
> I'd also add baBUSHka and VLADiVOStok (two stressed syllables and
> neither of them the right one...)
>
> On May 10, 2007, at 3:50 PM, George Kalbouss wrote:
>
>> The discussion on the pronunciation of Kluev has led me to wonder
>> out loud about a
>> phenomenon that I have been patiently putting up with lo these 60
>> years, namely, how
>> Anglo-speakers seem to have a talent to rarely guess where the
>> stress should go on
>> a Russian name.
>>
>> Some of the worst mis-stresses I can figure out. MiKHAIL becomes
>> "Mick-HALE"
>> because it looks like that, and DACHa is stressed correctly but
>> the pronunciation is
>> DAKHA (not the way the word actually looks) because an analogy,
>> for some unknown
>> reason, is made with the concentration camp, Dachau.
>>
>> Others, however, make me wonder -- and perhaps some linguist
>> colleagues can
>> help out -- is there an overriding principle in the English
>> language or culture why this
>> butchering is done? Some of the more common examples:
>>
>> VLAdimir
>> PavLOVa
>> SharaPOva (she finally gave in and said, ok, that's my name)
>> Ki-EV
>> TOLstoy
>> LerMONTov (I doubt the pronouncers have heard of Learmont)
>> KHRUSHchev
>> TURD-jenev
>> LeNEEN, StaLEEN (yes, despite the notoriety of these names)
>> StolichNAYA (the escape route is STOLi, not StoLI).
>>
>> In exasperation, I tell my Anglo speakers, just decide where you
>> want to put the stress and
>> then move it one to the right. If you think the stress should go
>> on the last syllable, then put
>> it on the first. At least I increase the probablity of getting it
>> right.
>>
>> As a consolation, they get BLOK and TVER right the first time.
>>
>> Then, there's Nemerovich-Danchenko, Dnepropetrovsk and
>> Petrodvorets.-- maybe we're
>> asking too much.
>>
>> George Kalbouss
>> (The) Ohio State University
>>
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Gerald Janecek, Professor of Russian
gjanecek at uky.edu
Dept. of Modern & Classical Languages
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506
Editor, Slavic & East European Journal
seej at uky.edu
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