medved' and Medvedev

[Emily Saunders]

It seems to me that we are straying from the point -- which is to get  
native English speakers with no knowledge of Russian phonetics to give  
a fairly good approximation of correct pronunciation of a foreign name  
without having to give them a lecture on soft consonants.  I have a  
good friend (American) who is married to a Turk.  When they were  
expecting their first child, they wanted to pick out a Turkish name,  
but one that wouldn't be butchered by English speakers.  Their  
solution was to send a list of names by email to her mother and then  
have her mother read them back over the phone.  Since both of the  
parents-to-be were familiar with how the Turkish should sound, their  
imaginations didn't extend to the all the possible ways the English  
tongue would distort the original Turkish.  They found out with a  
vengeance when grandma-to-be called up, and some of their favorite  
names got instantly crossed off the list.

At any rate, the point of my long-winded anecdote is to illustrate  
that with this sort of request you've got to forget what you know and  
think like someone who knows nothing about Russian.  Quibbling over  
whether we're allowing palatalization because it's in the original or  
the exact partitioning of syllables is a bit beside the point.  Get an  
English speaker to read what you've got back to you and you'll quickly  
find out how close you are.  Some of the better transliterations for  
"dummies" are some of the more heinous looking to the experts.  My  
guess is that if you read "Mid-VAY-dyiff" with your broadest American  
accent showing, it'll be fairly close, even if someone mistakenly puts  
an extra syllable in the last one.

Regards,

Emily Saunders

On Mar 2, 2008, at 8:57 PM, Paul B. Gallagher wrote:

> Frank Y. Gladney wrote:
>
>> Deborah Hoffman's Mid-VED-dyeff isn't bad, certainly better than Paul
>> Gallagher's Mid-VED-iff with its bad syllabification.
>
> Bad for Russian, necessary for English. How else will you get the  
> lax ("short") vowel? Remember, English prohibits syllables ending  
> with that vowel (unless you count r-less British dialects, with  
> "fair" as [fɛ:] etc.).
>
> If you want to syllabify as "Mid-VED-yiff," I suppose that would be  
> tolerable, but it still sounds to me like a soft sign is being  
> inserted.
>
> This is inevitably a question of tradeoffs, of finding the least bad  
> mispronunciation, and if I have to accept a soft sign to get the  
> correct vowel in the stressed syllable, I'll do it. I won't like it,  
> but I'll do it, because I won't accept "эй" in the stressed  
> syllable.
>
>> But let's remember that palatalized dental stops in Russian are
>> somewhat affricated.  So I propose Midge-VAY-jiff.
>
> <wince>
>
> Up with THAT I will not put.
>
> -- 
> 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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