Thread: Famous names once and for all

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.

If I was in Germany I would write it as "Artöm".

I believe that mixing different pronunciation patterns in one sentence (and even in one speech) is bad idea. If you speak Russian you should use Russian-adopted variants of proper names. Otherwise it is difficult to switch between patterns both for speaker and auditory.