« Absurd, yet compelling. | Main | Marginally, marginally Russian. »
June 22, 2005
In which I mock Russian pronunciation inferior to my own.
(Of interest only to Russian speakers/learners, if anyone.)
I forgot to mention the crowning moment of this past weekend, and possibly of my entire career as a student of Russian: Max said I could pronounce the above letter perfectly. Perhaps he was simply being polite, but at any rate I feel I've come leaps and bounds since my early days of fearing the plural (the unsatisfyingly-transliterated "y" is the standard Russian plural ending), and of delivering said letter, when otherwise unavoidable, with fingers crossed, excessive emphasis, and an involuntary, chickenlike, forward jerk of the head as though to expel the vowel like a lump of potato from my windpipe.
I had a friend and classmate in St Petersburg who had decided several years ago that the sound was quite beyond his reach, and used instead a substitute of his own making. "Ya tam bweel," he would say. "Esli bweelo bwee..." (In all other respects his Russian was quite fluent and expressive, I hasten to add.)
This is very nearly as annoying as my first-year classmate's really quite astonishing ability, in the face of overwhelming pointers to quite another direction, of clinging to his pronunciation of (confusingly-spelt, admittedly) personal pronoun "ego" as, well, "eggo", like the waffles. He was able to correctly pronounce it in context, but when faced with the pronoun in written form, spent nearly a year failing to put two and two together.
Posted by michele at June 22, 2005 9:44 PM
Comments
This may interest you.
http://moskautranslated.ytmnd.com
Posted by: Johnny at June 28, 2005 4:03 PM