Subject
Re: squawk, gawk, and spoke (fwd)
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From: Jeff Alexander <jeff_alexander@franklin.com>
I would like to thank Tim Henderson for clearing up the confusion
about "gawk of"; it seems to be a good rhyme for the last two syllables
of Nabokov's name in British, but not in American English. I was
beginning to doubt my admittedly very rusty Russian even more than
usual!
I would like to pose a question about the pronunciation of the
*final* syllable of N's name that a list member can perhaps answer.
Anatoly Vorobey writes:
> '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.
What I find confusing in Nabokov's choice of "love" as a rhyme for
the last syllable of his name is not in the vowel, but the consonant.
When I studied Russian phonetics, it was drilled into me that final
voiced consonants are always pronounced as their devoiced equivalents
(i.e. final "v" is pronounced "f", "b" becomes "p", "g" becomes "k", etc.),
so that "kov" is pronounced "kuhff". Knowing how important precision
was to Nabokov, his choice therefore puzzles me. Two possibilities
suggest themselves: 1) that in the Russian spoken in pre-revolutionary
St. Petersburg a final "v" would not have been devoiced to "f", and this
is simply a feature of modern spoken Russian; or 2) that Nabokov's own
pronunciation of the "v" in "love" was idiosyncratic. Any ideas?
Since I usually lurk on this list, let me introduce myself: I'm an
editor who lives in Philadelphia, USA, and am a big fan of Russian
literature generally and Nabokov in particular.
I would like to thank Tim Henderson for clearing up the confusion
about "gawk of"; it seems to be a good rhyme for the last two syllables
of Nabokov's name in British, but not in American English. I was
beginning to doubt my admittedly very rusty Russian even more than
usual!
I would like to pose a question about the pronunciation of the
*final* syllable of N's name that a list member can perhaps answer.
Anatoly Vorobey writes:
> '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.
What I find confusing in Nabokov's choice of "love" as a rhyme for
the last syllable of his name is not in the vowel, but the consonant.
When I studied Russian phonetics, it was drilled into me that final
voiced consonants are always pronounced as their devoiced equivalents
(i.e. final "v" is pronounced "f", "b" becomes "p", "g" becomes "k", etc.),
so that "kov" is pronounced "kuhff". Knowing how important precision
was to Nabokov, his choice therefore puzzles me. Two possibilities
suggest themselves: 1) that in the Russian spoken in pre-revolutionary
St. Petersburg a final "v" would not have been devoiced to "f", and this
is simply a feature of modern spoken Russian; or 2) that Nabokov's own
pronunciation of the "v" in "love" was idiosyncratic. Any ideas?
Since I usually lurk on this list, let me introduce myself: I'm an
editor who lives in Philadelphia, USA, and am a big fan of Russian
literature generally and Nabokov in particular.