Thread: Famous names once and for all

You are a perfectionist! It is as close as you can get without being Russian.
I bet you I could pronounce the name "Артём" without you hearing that I am not Russian. There is absolutely no difficulty with any of those letters.

Could you make a recording please?
If there was no difficulty with soft consonants, foreigners would pronounce them correctly. Yet Germans have big problems with them. The problem is that Russian has phonemic distinction between a soft consonant and a consonant plus [j].
Russians clearly hear the difference between:
hard t + o (то)
soft t + o (тё)
hard t + j + o (тъё)
soft t + j + o (тьё)

No, my name is Johanna, so it's the first letter that is pronounced differently.

How did those people in Belorussia transliterate your name?

But I noticed that some German women who have the same name, transliterate it as Йоганна.
I think I prefer the x sound rather than the g sound as a replacement for "h".

Which option looks better to you, as native speakers of Russian, in writing?

The variant with г came from Ukrainian language, for a nothern Russian х is the closest sound, that's why they usually use x now, sometimes two variants coexist.

By the way, how true is it that "Russians can't say "H" CAN you say it, or is it really hard?

It is more than true. We do not hear the difference between our x and [h]. I can pronounce it now, but I still sometimes can't distinguish between them.
However voicing is well heard by Russians. So, a voiced h will be completely different for a Russian from an unvoiced one.

Originally Posted by Marcus

Could you make a recording please?

No, because I don't have a microphone handy and I can't be fussed with it right now. I'll a recording of Russian in the autumn though when I start my Russian studies again.

How did those people in Belorussia transliterate your name?

They translated it Джоанна which would have been absolutely fine if I had been British or American with the name "Joanne or Joanna". I don't mind massively being called that in the UK.
But there is no difficulty with pronouncing my actual name, in Russian. The Jo bit is exactly like Ю, and if you go a bit easy on the x it sounds like a Swedish h.

For English people it is not easy at all, it sounds really wrong, so it's ok that they pronounce it in the way that is familiar to them. It's the mispronounciation that is annoying.

I think that both Belarus and Ukraine have the letter "h" in their languages, at least in the spoken form. They can say it.

Many people in Belarus actually replaced x or g with h when speaking Russian. We talked about it here before - apparently Alexander Lukashenko to some extent speaks in this way.
I was not keen on this dialact because it made it much harder for me to understand what they were saying. The Belarussians were funny in that although everyone loved the Belarussian language, very few could actually speak it, you could just sence its influence in the dialect and see it on signs. A bit like Irish which I know you like, Marcus.