Thread: Famous names once and for all

Originally Posted by miloserdie

Let's lay these names to rest.

What's the question here? Are you wondering mainly about syllable stress?

As a general rule, I think, surnames ending in -овский or -евский are stressed on the -ов-/-ев syllable, while those ending in -ой are ending-stressed (but not necessarily the final syllable -- the feminine of Толстой is Толстая, for instance). And the vowel ё is always stressed -- hence, Горбачёв.

Also, of course, the letter в is always pronounced like ф when it's the final letter in a word, while unstressed о is reduced to а or "schwa". So old Splotchy's surname is said гəр-ба-ЧОФ, but his wife (Раиса) was гəр-ба-ЧО-ва.

Many (not all) masculine given names have different stress in their native and anglicized forms -- often with the stress shifted one syllable to the left in English. Thus, Ivan but Иван; Mikhail but Михаил; Vladimir but Владимир; Boris but Борис.

With those general guidelines aside, most or all of these people can be found on English-wikipedia along with the stress-marked Russian spelling and IPA pronunciation of their names. So if you look up Nabokov, for instance, you'll find:

Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, pronounced [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr nɐˈbokəf]

(Hmm, for some reason the vowel-stress marks got shifted onto the consonants! No worries, though -- they display correctly in the wiki article, and the Nabokov entry even has an audio recording of a native Russian speaker pronouncing the name, though not all of the articles necessarily do.)

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

What's the question here? Are you wondering mainly about syllable stress?

As a general rule, I think, surnames ending in -овский or -евский are stressed on the -ов-/-ев syllable, while those ending in -ой are ending-stressed (but not necessarily the final syllable -- the feminine of Толстой is Толстая, for instance). And the vowel ё is always stressed -- hence, Горбачёв.

Also, of course, the letter в is always pronounced like ф when it's the final letter in a word, while unstressed о is reduced to а or "schwa". So old Splotchy's surname is said гəр-ба-ЧОФ, but his wife (Раиса) was гəр-ба-ЧО-ва.

Many (not all) masculine given names have different stress in their native and anglicized forms -- often with the stress shifted one syllable to the left in English. Thus, Ivan but Иван; Mikhail but Михаил; Vladimir but Владимир; Boris but Борис.

I wonder why the stress shift happens. Is it difficult to pronounce those words with the stress on the correct syllable? But how do you manage to pronounce begin, for example? Germanic languages tend to have the stress on the first root syllable, but how could the word "machine" survive with the second syllable stressed?

Originally Posted by Marcus

but how could the word "machine" survive with the second syllable stressed?

maybe cause it's French? CH pronounced as SH isn't typical English phonetics, just a guess