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.)