Tolstovo, Alex
Noooooooooooooooo!
Alex Trebek just pronounced the genitive of Tolstoy as "Tols-toh-goh". Yes, it's spelled with a G, but it's pronounced "V": tols-toh-vo.*
Sure, most people probably would. But Alex is so snotty about his ability to pronounce French (and Latin, for that matter), that it pleases me to point out when he screws up. After all, how hard would it be to get an intern to look it up?
* Yes, Russian's fairly phonetically spelled - especially compared with English. But it has well-known exceptions, and Толстого shows two of them, this standard masculine/neuter adjectival genitive ending and the other being that an unstressed O is pronounced like Ah.
2 Comments:
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At 8:14 PM, February 26, 2010
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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At 8:33 PM, February 26, 2010
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->I learned that when I read "The Hunt for Red October" (so never say that Tom Clancy isn't educational). A number of Russian words are sprinkled throughout, and one is "nichevo". I wasn't immediately sure from the context what, exactly, that meant (though I got the idea), so I looked it up in my Russian-English dictionary.
Or tried to. I found ничего, but not ничево, and the meaning fit. That led me to find out the final "-го" rule (and that made me wonder why Doctor Zhivago isn't pronounced "Zhivava", but, hey, it's a name).
Is it just an unstressed "o" that turns into "ah", or does that happen to other vowels as well? I understood that, for instance, "Gorbachev" winds up as "chav", more than "chev".
Спасибо.
Yes - it's not all G's that are V - only the ones in the genitive, which nichevo is (negation takes the genitive; the nominative of "nothing" is nichto.
The E in -EV names is often really an O. Lots of Russian E's are O's - it's a long story having to do with East vs South Slavic, and the influence of Church Slavonic ... Gorbachev is gar-bah-chohff.
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