My wife and I saw the new Star Trek — which both of us though was good fun, though no great shakes — and it reminded me of one glitch that I had long noticed.
Chekhov, the ostentatiously Russian character, speaks with what's supposed to be an ostentatiously Russian accent, but its most prominent aspect is that he pronounces "v"s as "w"s, as if Russians have a hard time pronouncing "v"s. But it's really the other way around: Russians tend to pronounce "w"s as "v"s (the capital of the U.S., for instance, is rendered "Vah-shing-ton'" and they have no trouble at all with "v"s.
Given that I'm Yevgeniy Vladimirovich Volokh, with four "v"s in my full name, I can vouch (not wouch) for that. And Chekov himself — the Star Trek Chekov, not his less famous near-namesake — is Pavel Andreievich Chekov; I don't recall his pronouncing it Pawel Andreiewich Chekow (though maybe I missed something).
Now if you want to come up with a defense for the show, perhaps the answer would be that the Russian accent had changed in the centuries between now and the events depicted in Star Trek. But that kind of defeats the purpose, I take it, of having what seems like an ostentatiously Russian accent.
By the way, for purposes of evaluating whether my and my wife's reaction to the movie (setting aside the v/w matter) might help you decide whether to watch the movie yourself: My wife and I aren't Star Trek fans; I once was, in my early teens, but later came to dislike the series; I haven't watched any of the later series; I watched three or four of the movies, but didn't much like any except for Wrath of Khan (The plane! The plane!); my wife didn't watch either the series or the other movies; and we both like science fiction movies, though only I like science fiction novels.
One of the most well known examples of this is from the episode The Trouble with Tribbles, when Scotty and Chekov are sitting in the bar arguing about which distilled spirit is sufficiently manly to drink.
Scotty disparages vodka by asking Chekov when he's going to "get off that milk diet." Chekov responds by declaring that scotch "vas inwented by a little old lady in Leningrad."
Dan Schmutter
Which explains exactly why the Russians, Czechs and Poles like me are the best in the world at Scrabble, since we know how to use all the tough letters, even consecutively.
And also explains our legitimate anger at the Polynesians and Hawaiians, after they stole all the easy ones.
Also, there is the German form of w being pronounced as v, as in Werner. I see no reason the opposite would not happen somewhere.
Personally, I have a difficult time not instinctively saying "nucular" instead of "nuclear." I don't know why - nobody in my family mispronounces it. So I just say "nuke" to avoid embarrassing myself.
My wife, a native Russian speaker, does exactly that. She has a hard time remembering which v's get changed. So she says things like "Wodka"
No - in Movie Russia, the letter mispronounced is "u".
Quid est v(w)eritas?
typo
my and my wife.
not "my and your wife"
[Whoops, fixed, thanks! -EV]
And for accents... movie-Australia's is like nothing ever spoken by any Australian ever in this galaxy. I think someone came close. Once. Michael Caine at the end of "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" sort of approximated what a cockney might sound like by age 62 if he'd emigrated to Darwin at age 60. But never anywhere else.
I think when a language does not distinguish two sounds or lacks one of them, you can get transposition artifacts like this.
That we never saw Chekov during the first season does not mean he wasn't already on board. The Enterprise supposedly had over 400 officers and crew at any given time, so there were plenty we never met and others who must have been there for quite a while before we finally did meet them. Chekov may have been reassigned to the bridge after being stationed for a while in another part of the ship.
Similarly, that we never saw Chekov and Khan on screen together in that episode does not mean they never met. Khan et al. were on board for several days (I think), and we did not see every moment of his visit.
(Geek hat off.)
Not much different from movie-Klingon, where the Klingon speaker grunts one or two harsh-sounding Klingon words and then lapses into English.
I'm reminded of this famous scene. The relevant bit starts about 2:10. But it's worth watching in its entirety. Highbrow stuff.
And anyone who isn't a fan of Star Trek should give Deep Space Nine a try (though skip straight to the third season). This was the show that finally asked, "How did this bunch of space-pansies become a galactic superpower?" (ANSWER: The Federation has walls. And those walls need to be guarded. And who's going to do that? Some elderly French guy with an English accent and penchant for self-righteous speeches? I don't think so.)
I had an Indian friend in high school, with me in Model UN, who represented the Watican.
This reminds me of the following classic joke.
A man and his wife were planning a vacation. They ended up in an argument, though..."It's 'Hawaii', I'm telling you!" she said.
"I never KNEW someone so stubborn! 'Havaii' is how it's pronounced!" he replied.
And so it went all the way to the vacation...
As they got off the airplane, they passed a man. The husband abruptly stopped the wife and turned to the man to ask, "Now that we're on the island, you can settle an argument between my wife and me. Is this'Hawaii' or 'Havaii?'"
"This is Havaii," the man replied.
"Ha!" the husband gloated, turning to his wife. "See, didn't I tell you never to argue with me? I'm alllll-ways right!"
As they began to walk away, he turned back and gave the man a hearty "Thank you!"
"You're Velcome!!!"
And of course there's the famous migrating "h" in "Gandhi" - English doesn't use the Hindi "dh" sound, so we get "Ghandi" and "Gahndi".
Even die-hard fans of Springsteen and/or Cold Chisel have been known to misspell Khe Sanh as Khe Sahn".
And to bring this back to Trek... up to 40% of the times the second movie gets cited, I'm thinking "Huh? What's Herman Kahn got to be wrathful about?"
Richard's joke reminds me of a little anecdote from when I taught high school in Sacramento, a city which has almost as many Russians as Mexicans in some neighborhoods. One day I asked a pre-algebra class what would be the result of repeatedly taking the square root of a proper fraction. A Mexican boy answered, "It would be bery, bery large." To which a Russian girl rolled her eyes and said, "Eets pronoonced veeery."
With apologies to the native Russian speakers here, the lack of accent authenticity might have been an artifact of the era when Chekov first appeared. Chekov was added to the original series character list during the height of the Cold War, and most of the movies with the original cast also occurred before the collapse of the Soviet Union. As long as he sounded vaguely like he was from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, that was generally close enough for audiences of the time. Sort of like Boris and Natasha from the old Bullwinkle cartoons of the same era (tho they didn't seem to have much trouble with "V"s, see, e.g., "Beeg Trouple Fuhr Moose Und Squirrrrrvl...").
And in the new movie, young Chekov (only 17 years old and at the helm already!) was just overdoing the old mannerisms and accent as part of the low-level camp that pervaded the whole flick.
Now what REALLY bothered me about the movie was how Scotty seemed to be channeling the chaotic neutral randomness of, say, Pippin from LOTR waaaaay more than the original Cmdr. Scott ever would have...
I thought the movie was very good and a lot of fun to watch. They could have gone with a tired old flick that offered nothing but nostalgia, but they didn't. They made a very good movie and they deserve to be rewarded with a big box office.
They made first rate casting choices as well. The guys who play Kirk and Spock are both great, the one who plays Scotty is lots of fun, Eric Bana plays a great bad guy and kudos to Bruce Greenwood for adding another movie to his lengthy character actor resume.
A recent LA Times article said:
For some reason, I can't include the links to the Wikipedia and LA Times articles, but they're easy to find.
How does your sister-in-law feel about being associated with you :) ! Wasn't/Isn't she a rabid fan?
A half-dozen years back, a poster on the Evol-Psych mailing list commented:
Whereupon, the late Larry Trask, then Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex, posted the following in response (afterwards granting me permission to quote him elsewhere in this regard):
Thus, it would appear that neither Russian nor any other Indo-European language shares English's w consonant.
That reminds me of, I think, Matrix Reloaded. The guy who plays the Merovingian is actually French, and he started doing his lines in a normal French accent. But the directors said no, they wanted it to be an insanely goofy French accent. So he did that instead.
Part of the reason was that everything we had become used to was new: warp drive, transporters, Vulcans. And the captain had a beagle.
And the science officer made me think, "Spock? Who?".
... with a W. Italian retains the semi-vowel W sound (ie, no extra syllable) with "qu" and "gu". However, it might confirm Prof Trask's argument to note that in French, Spanish and Portuguese (and, IIRC, German) the U is silent, and does no more than make it a K or hard G sound ("unique", "guerrilla"). And in Romanian, Latin "1u" is typically turned into a "p". Sorry, don't know enough to speak for Catalan, Romansch, etc.
My high school Japanese teacher one asked us, "How did your class elections go?" Substitute r's for l's, add in teenagers, and imagine how we laughed for at least half of the class.
</blockquote>
There was a famous incident during the US occupation of Japan in which a Japanese band honoring Douglas McArthur put up a banner that read: "We pray for McCarthur's erection".
Pavel Chekhov doesn't have a Russian accent, he speaks with an assumed Russian accent. That is, he doesn't naturally speak with a Russian accent, but for one reason or another has adopted a Russian chauvinism, and as a part of that has adopted what he assumes is a Russian accent. His accent is as authentic as a 3rd generation Southie pretending to be Irish.
Typically we see this go the opposite way for a reason. Classical Latin "vino" is pronounced "wino" but becomes "vino" in Medieval Spanish and both Middle and Modern Italian. (Modern Spanish loses the v phoneme and replaces with a b, but Ladino preserves the v. OK, I am officially a Language Geek.)
Typically when we see consonent changes, they tend to go towards the palate. Thus the labial "w" can become the labiodental "v" much easier than the other way around. I suspect that the reason is that most vowels (2 exceptions) are pronounced almost exclusively via the part of the mouth around the palate. Thus palatization results in less work pronouncing a word. Hope this helps.
Steve: Maybe Lithuanian? If Wikipedia is to be believed, it has no [v], but does have a labial glide, which would probably sound like a [w] to most English speakers.
Following up on that, my preferred explanation is that Chekhov's first language is actually some language spoken in Russia (or at least the Russian sphere of influence) other than Russian (Lithuanian looks like one candidate, but there are others, especially given a little wiggle room for a couple centuries of language change). This might help to account for the full over-the-top-ness of his stereotyped Russian behavior. Coming from a different linguistic group, he could be very self-conscious about being perceived as insufficiently Russian, and be overcompensating.
(I don't know offhand whether English is really unique in the way described, but the claim that it's the only thing with a [w] as reflex of IE *w is what it looks like he's saying, and i know counterexamples to the other interpretation (on which English is the only i.e. language with a [w]) are easy to come by.)
Roddenberry added Chekov, but they weren't exactly pleased. If I remember right, two of their responses were "You've spelled Chekov's name wrong- it's spelled "C-h-e-c-k-o-f-f"!" and "Do us a favor; spend the five dollars and give Comrade Chekov a decent haircut."
I just assumed that the bad Russian accent was sort of an "in-joke", like the red-shirt jumper who went with Sulu and Kirk.
Actually, this is not as inaccurate as it sounds. English technical words cause French people little trouble because they come from Latin or Greek, and so are the same in French. An English-speaking mathematician can pick up a French math paper and understand maybe 80% of it with basically no training, and I assume vice-versa. However, they have trouble with German-derived words... one of my French friends could never choose correctly between "let" and "leave [behind]" -- both "laisser" in French -- but he generally had no problem with jargon.
Chekov vs Chekhov.
Eugene taskes me! He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him round the moons of Nebir and round the Antares Maelstrom and round perdition's FLAMES before I give him up!
President of ladies garden club explains that a Fokker was a type of German aircraft, as Olly the Swede, a pilot in WWI, describes being jumped by a group of German planes to the club.
Olly: Yeah, but some of those fokkers were Junkers.
Many Europeans who learn English as a second language will learn British rather than American pronunciations.
Having them speak English with a Russian accent wouldn't be any more realistic than having them speak English with a British accent. Realism would be watching the movie in Russian with subtitles.
Movies are not about reality
There is no v character in Arabic and no v sound. There is, however a character called waw which is sometimes pronounced as u (oo) and sometimes as the English w. For instance the word "Wahhabi" starts with this letter in Arabic. (In Hebrew, one character stands for both b and v, clearly pronounced one way or another depending on the context, but vav - a different character and the counterpart to the Arabic waw - is never pronounced as w).
Polish has indeed a phonetic equivalent of w, although I suspect its derivation may be not from that I/E sound because it's presented as a version of l. On the other hand, Belarusian, which is very close to Polish, has a "non-syllable u" letter (ŭ in its non-cyrillic incarnation) which is pretty much that w.
Sorry to disappoint you, but there is no w sound equivalent in Lithuanian. In my view, the fun and intentional transposition theory (for Start Trek) is the most plausible. It is true that Russians with milder accents sometimes overcompensate w's simply because it takes an effort to pronounce w where it's required and sometimes they slip in real time. Russians with heavy accents use v more consistently throughout.
"Anton is fantastic as Chekov. He's from Russia originally and one of our early discussions was that they don't transpose 'w' and 'v'; that's not a Russian thing. In fact it's more a Polish thing. But I was like 'I think we have to do it anyway'. It's so what you know with Chekov so we kept what had come before."
So a deliberate anachronism (of sorts).
of course, hypercorrection remains an easier, if less fun, explanation.
And then there's the movie Spartacus, where all the Romans speak with British accents and all the slaves speak with American accents. I understand this was the subject of much mirth--among the Brits--on the set.
Just as a historical note, Chekov wasn't only added to get a Russian character on the show. He was also given a Beatles-esque haircut because of the popularity of "The Monkees" at the time. CBS was hoping Chekov would somehow help draw in that crowd with his wonderful 'do.
Truth, stranger than...
Germans write "W" and say what English speakers say for "V." "Wilkommen" is pronounced "Vilkommen."
They also write "V" and say what English speakers say for "F." So, "Volkswagen" is pronounced "Folksvagen." (Both rules apply there.) But the "V" isn't always an "F." In words of non-Germanic origin, the written "V" is pronounced like an English "V." "Universitaet" has a perfectly normal "V" sound in it.
In my experience, these non-Germanic words are the ones some Germans will mess up and pronounce with a "W" sound. I've heard "uniweristy" and "willage," for example. I assume the rule these speakers use is "V goes to W, F goes to V." Which works, except for these exceptions.
Is there any strange little wrinkle in Russian that works like that?
Hmm... I did not look at a chart of this type. To me it sounded like they were just pronouncing v, but I was there a long time ago. I just tuned to a Lithuanian radiostation on the net, and it still sounded more like v, but there may be a nuance that's hard to tell for my ear. They do have a lot of diphtong sounds "au" which is pronounced as "ow" in English. I can doublecheck the description in my thick Lithuanian textbook which I don't have handy right now. It's quite possible that English speakers could convert it to w when speaking Lithuanian.
I don't think so. In fact, Russian has to go through contortions to somehow reflect the English "w". Sometimes those approaches change with time. It used to be that Holmes's buddy, Doc Watson, was spelled in Russian as "Vatson" but now it's spelled as "Uotson" (all in Cyrillic of course). And still many would pronounce "u" and "o" more in a separated way rather than a diphthong which would be closer to "w"
But of course, as Eugene noted, Washington is still spelled "Vashington" not "Uoshington"
When I had first moved to Kiev... I was maybe in the country six months and had already finished off my Stargate SG1 DVD's so I decided to watch the Star Trek films and was appalled when I heard Chekhov's "W"-speak. I mean i ha been in the region long enough to know that Russian had no "W" sound; And had just started my formal Russian lessons, so I was pretty sure that they made a mistake (just like the author of the article).
I've been in Eastern Europe now for 4 years, I speak Russian, Heck I do public speaking in Russian. I do a little translation, and for the most part have very little interaction with native English speakers. As is the usual case, while I was trying to master Russian everyone wanted to converse in English. I started to notice something:
People ACTUALLY used "W" for "V" words. It astounded me.
I never asked why. It's kind of difficult to ask: "Why do you talk the way you do?" They have no way of answering that. It's like asking an African why his skin is dark... ummm because it is.
So, I being the observant fellow that I am, started to pick up on a few things, and while terribly incomplete a reason, here is my basis for the V-W switch:
Russian has no "W" and with many words that are russified (that is non native words that have become common in the vernacular and modified to fit the native tongue)words with a "W" get a "V" sound...
hence the "Washinton" "Vashintone" example
But it gets difficult when other words that have a similar sound to "W" get changed like: "au" or "ui", so instead of "Auto" and "Biscuit" you now have "Avto" and "Biskvit".
all international words get the same treatment: so "baseball" becomes "beizbol". But the problem is words like "Volleyball" are "Volybol".
So words with "W" become "V". Words with "V" are still "V" 9except when they become "B" but that's a whole other story) and words that don't even have "W" but kind-of sound similar get the "V" Treatment as well.
well it starts getting confusing for them...
Add to that the fact that The English word for water is, well: "Water", and the Russian word is "Voda" and "Vodka", the oh so popular drink is a diminutive form for water: in fact it literally means "just a drop of water" (kind of). So no you have words that are similar with a "W-V" difference!!!
And then to top it all off, not all Languages that use the Roman alphabet are created the same. For many of the Slavic bordering countries... Poland to use an example, the letter "W" has a the "V" sounder in their language... So since they are so close, the imports into Russian speaking countries get polish stuff, with Roman Letters, But With the "W" having a "V" sound. So Vodka is spelled "Wotka"...
and anyone studying English knows that "W" has a "W" sound, and since many have no formal language training (immigrants) or if they do it's with another non native speaker (or limited interaction at best - I met with an English speaker my first year here... she had been teaching it for 15 years... and I was the first native speaker she ever met).
So many never get to hear it spoken properly and have to discern for themselves, whether in a non English speaking country or simply an immigrant in a tightly knit community.
So with all this going on it becomes difficult to decipher when is "W" and when is "V" and many err on the side of "W".
interestingly enough: "Willage" is the most common one I hear.
Really the harder thing to deal with is the lack of Definite articles. I find people using "THE" in all the wrong places or not using it at all, and apparently many teachers for get to teach the fact that English has "A" and "AN".
In conclusion, I used to be like the author of this... angered by the misrepresentation of the Russian/Eastern culture and it took me years to learn the truth that:
Star trek was way ahead of its time and these blokes knew what they were doing!
PS: Chekov isn't really a chauvinist. He pretty accurately represents the Machismo of the culture here... it's the "male" way to be.... there are still clearly defined gender roles and ideas of masculinity and femininity over here.
Chauvinist is being used here as excessive patriotism, a phenomena separate from male chauvinism.
Ukrainian, though, has an H.
(a) G (Gitler, Gusein) - perhaps a reversal of the Ukrainian pronunciation of the gamma-derived letter?;
(b) KH (X) (example escapes memory at present but I do recall seeing some - c/f how Anthony Burgess rendered XOROIIIO as "horrorshow" in Clockwork Orange; or
(c) silent - OTEJl for hotel and BOK3AJl for station (from "Vauxhall", interestingly).
I thought otel' was silent as a result of its French source; isn't it proununced (otel) in French?
BTW is Anton Yelchin's surname a variant English transliteration of "Yeltsin" (c/f Clancy/ Clanchy), or a whole different surname (c/f Smith/ Smyth or Volokh/ Wallach)?
On a humorous note having to do with English transliterations of foreign names, when my Finnish great-great-grandparents came into Ellis Island, their surname "Pyykkonen" was written "Buchanan" since they are pronounced similarly (if you place the stress on the first syllable of "Buchanan").
Of course, I had some difficulties learning how to pronounce thorn and eth, which I tended to degrade to s and z.
The v/w confusion is a minor issue at Scrabble, because I tend to pronounce words correctly but keep them indexed as the same letter in the great orthographical store in my head. So, for example, vary/wary isn't a problem because both exist, but very/*wery trips me up. I try to spell the word with the Scrabble letters in front of me, and then remember that English uses a different letter for that word.
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