pronun. of "Medvedev" (cont.)

[Prof Steven P Hill]

Dear colleagues and Miss Mohnkern:

The Russian surname "Medevedev" does not suffer from the same problem 
as the negative "HET" (probably should be transcribed "nyet" with "Y" for 
the general public, to distinguish it from the existing Engl. word "net").

Therefore I suggest not worrying about the "yeh" vowel and simply 
transcribe it as "med - VED - eff", adding a parenthetical note that 
"E" is pronounced by Russians as "YEH" (as in the once-famous 
Russ. negative "NET", which Russians pronounce " n - yet ").

If you wished to complicate matters considerably,  I suppose you could 
transcribe it as "m - yid - v - YEHD - yiff", spoken together as one name
of 3 syllables...

Good luck,
Steven P Hill,
University of Illinois.
___________________________________________________________________

Date: Sun 2 Mar 10:09:02 CST 2008
From: <LISTSERV at BAMA.UA.EDU>  
Subject: Re: GETPOST SEELANGS 
To: "Steven P. Hill" <s-hill4 at UIUC.EDU> 

Date: Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:53:38 -0500
From: Donna Griesenbeck <griesenb at FAS.HARVARD.EDU> 
Subject: Query re: Medvedev pronunciation 

Dear Colleagues,
I'm posting this message on behalf of William Safire's research 
assistant; please reply directly to her if you wish to weigh in.
Thanks, Donna Griesenbeck

Hi,
My name is Juliet Mohnkern and I am William Safire's research assistant 
for On Language in the New York Times magazine.  Currently I have been 
working on finding a layman's phonetic rendering of Medvedev .
Mr. Safire has asked me to find a consensus among experts about said 
pronunciation.  In that vein, would you agree with the below phonetic 
spelling of Medvedev?
*Mid-VYE-def *
I know this spelling does not offer the precision that the IPA or other 
phonetic systems could, but we are hoping for a description that most 
readers will be able to understand.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at 
juliet.mohnkern at gmail.com <mailto:juliet.mohnkern at gmail.com>.
Thank you again,
Juliet
__________________________________________________________________

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