Thread: ого and eго

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

I was taught in my college Russian classes that пирог and сапог should be pronounced пирок and сапок, but Бог is an exception -- the "Г" is pronounced as a "voiced" letter "Х" (a sound for which there is no letter in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet!). And the vocative Господи! also begins with a "voiced Х" sound -- not a "Г" or "К", and not a normal unvoiced "Х".

Throbert,
Your college teachers of Russian taught you well. Indeed, DEVOICING (or: "devocalization") of voiced Russian consonants /б/, /в/, /г/, д/, /ж/, /з/ in the end of Russian words is a norm. You provided several good examples to illustrate this devoicing.

However, the tendency to pronounce the inflexions "-ого" as /ава/ and "-его" as /ива/ is a different rule, because 1) there is no devoicing of "-г-" to /к/, and 2) this rule applies not just to any word, but to adjectives, pronouns and ordinal numerals, as was shown earlier.