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Re: squawk, gawk, and spoke (fwd)
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From: Tim Henderson <thenders@mail.lanline.com>
Today the pronounciation guide poem, the one referred to earlier in
this thread appeared in the New York Times in an article entitled
"Nabokov as Mounted Specimen."
I'm afraid it's going to further confuse U.S. readers like myself.
After a private exchange with Anatoly Vorobey, who writes below, I
believe that in order to rhyme "Nabokov" with "gawk of" one must use a
British pronounciation and that indeed my way of saying "spoke of"
(without the more drawn-out British dipthong) is much closer.
Certainly I'm no more a linguist than that Englishman of _Pale
Fire_ fame. But it seems to me that in US speech we're looking for an OH
here rather than the AH we would use in "gawk". Na-BAHK-ov opens wide
for a tongue depressor (Say AH!) while the proper prounounciation
puckers up for a kiss (OH dear!).
Mr Vorobey points out that the sound is very similar to the accented o
of French and Spanish. (mort and don)
Galya Diment wrote:
>
> Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com>
>
> My native Russian tells me that 'Nabokov' doesn't rhyme with 'spoke of'
> at all; the diphthong sound of 'spoke of' is absent in Russian, which is
> why Russian native speakers often mispronounce it in English as a
> juxtaposition of two distinct vowels ('go-oo', 'spo-oo-k of'). The
> stressed vowel is Nabokov is definitely closer to that in 'squawk', 'gawk'
> (or 'God' in the traditionally British pronunciation). 'Nabokov' does
> not technically rhyme with 'love' because the stressed syllables are
> different; when Nabokov said it did, he meant the *last* syllable of
> 'Nabokov', which is reduced to schwa in pronunciation, as unstressed
> vowels in Russian generally are.
>
> --
> Anatoly Vorobey,
> mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/
> "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton
Today the pronounciation guide poem, the one referred to earlier in
this thread appeared in the New York Times in an article entitled
"Nabokov as Mounted Specimen."
I'm afraid it's going to further confuse U.S. readers like myself.
After a private exchange with Anatoly Vorobey, who writes below, I
believe that in order to rhyme "Nabokov" with "gawk of" one must use a
British pronounciation and that indeed my way of saying "spoke of"
(without the more drawn-out British dipthong) is much closer.
Certainly I'm no more a linguist than that Englishman of _Pale
Fire_ fame. But it seems to me that in US speech we're looking for an OH
here rather than the AH we would use in "gawk". Na-BAHK-ov opens wide
for a tongue depressor (Say AH!) while the proper prounounciation
puckers up for a kiss (OH dear!).
Mr Vorobey points out that the sound is very similar to the accented o
of French and Spanish. (mort and don)
Galya Diment wrote:
>
> Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com>
>
> My native Russian tells me that 'Nabokov' doesn't rhyme with 'spoke of'
> at all; the diphthong sound of 'spoke of' is absent in Russian, which is
> why Russian native speakers often mispronounce it in English as a
> juxtaposition of two distinct vowels ('go-oo', 'spo-oo-k of'). The
> stressed vowel is Nabokov is definitely closer to that in 'squawk', 'gawk'
> (or 'God' in the traditionally British pronunciation). 'Nabokov' does
> not technically rhyme with 'love' because the stressed syllables are
> different; when Nabokov said it did, he meant the *last* syllable of
> 'Nabokov', which is reduced to schwa in pronunciation, as unstressed
> vowels in Russian generally are.
>
> --
> Anatoly Vorobey,
> mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/
> "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton