Help Needed pronouncing Skaters Names

[sabinfire]

Incidentally, is it just me, or does anybody else find that the announcers say her name really fast compared to when they say other skaters' names? It is almost as if they don't want you to make out what they are saying in case it is wrong...

If her name is being pronounced as it is written in Cyrillic (I don't have a video of her saying her name at the moment), it may sound fast to many foreign ears due to unfamiliar sounds. I can't say for certain about specific announcers, unless you have examples or links.

 

[bartlebooth]

Thanks! It has puzzled me for a long time, how Scimeca's name is pronounced properly...

I think that Scimeca is originally an Italian name (Sicilian, precisely), and in Italian it would be pronounced Shee -MAY-ca.
Of course, Alexa and her family can pronounce it with a silent c if they want, I only wanted to point out that it is originally a foreign name.
I'm not even sure she has Sicilian ancestry.

 

[el henry]

I think that Scimeca is originally an Italian name (Sicilian, precisely), and in Italian it would be pronounced Shee -MAY-ca.
Of course, Alexa and her family can pronounce it with a silent c if they want, I only wanted to point out that it is originally a foreign name.
I'm not even sure she has Sicilian ancestry.

I have seen another vid with Alexa and she does not pronounce the "c". Americans often discard the "original" pronunciation of names from other countries. I remember a television announcer thinking he was oh-so-suave calling an interviewee with the last name of Rizzo "Reet-so" until the interviewee interrupted and said, actually, that's my nonna; *my* last name is Rizzo (pronounced as spelled in English).

And for the opposite issue, I loooved hearing Vincent Resencourt give Jason Brown's name the full-on French: zha-Sohn.(he may have inserted an American long "a", but close enough

 

[dorispulaski]

Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier say their names
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr4MxUqDnaA

Kaetlyn Osmond says her name
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GquEQCIXAUg

Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje say their names
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzggE_KUA_w

Nam Nguyen says his name
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYsk8czgsVo

Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir say their names
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXKn9eyMR_Q

Alexandra Paul and Michell Islam say their names
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNcFBpmxH3U

Kirsten Moore-Towers and Dylan Moscovitch say their names
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbdajOWHi3c

Andrei Rogozine says his name
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWAosoyw6dc

Patrick Chan says his name
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqYgJ1Efiwg

Paige Lawrence and Rudi Swiegers say their names
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyXFzBScCQM

A clearer version of Véronik Mallet saying her name
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYAz53gr6Jc

Gabby Daleman says her name
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtjf22SOmJE

 

[sabinfire]

Not sure of the dates on all these so I went with the year of publication on YouTube unless it's obvious it's not right.

G/P:
https://youtu.be/79-KWfs2YhA

Osmond:
https://youtu.be/9ZZ3AU4Ycqo

Nguyen:
https://youtu.be/uTRHAL1ulBY

 

[dorispulaski]

Natasha Purich and Mervyn Tran
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkFtnZMEIpQ

 

[el henry]

I also need to totally geek out on Veronik Mallet's pronunciation of her name. In my experience (admittedly close to 40 years ago at this point), Quebecois often use short "i"s where French from France use long "i". Thus I expected Veronik to say "ver-o-nick". But she says "ver-o-neek", like the French.

Geek time over.

 

[ice coverage]

Aleksei Krasnozhon saying his name:

https://instagram.com/p/8We6ICJcdk/ (Oct 2)​

Thanks again to Doris and sabinfire, our busiest beavers in this thread.

 

[dorispulaski]

Thanks golden, I wondered how that should be pronounced.

 

[petitebrie]

Russians probably pronounce Tuktamysheva wrong because it’s not a common, ethnically Russian name. Most people automatically stress the Y, because they’ve never heard Tuktamysheva before, and stressing the Y feels natural.

-ev and -ov at the end of names is a genitive construction, e.g. Ivanov = of Ivan, and Medvedev = of bear (animal names are quite common actually, Volkov, Voronov, Sorokin etc.) Similarly, -in is an old genitive/last name construction for words that end with -a. For example Nikitin = of Nikita, or Moskvin = of Moscow (Moskva). For women they just put an -a at the end in both cases.

Alena and Alyona are the same name. It’s written Алёна, however, the umlaut over the e is often dropped in writing. It’s like one of those weird pronunciation rules – native speakers know it’s supposed to be an ë anyway, so they don’t bother to put the umlaut. This is very frustrating for foreign learners, because e is pronounced ‘eh’ and ë is pronounced ‘yo’! Sometimes it’s just transliterated as it is written rather than pronounced, and you get 'Alena' instead of 'Alyona'.

Then there’s the ‘Chtch’ spectacle. The usual English transliteration is, as mentioned, ‘shch’, and refers to one sound in Russian. It’s like a soft and slightly drawn out ‘sh’. It's a difficult phoneme to master, so it's quite acceptable to say ‘sh’ if you don’t speak Russian. ‘Chtch’ is how it is transliterated into French. Plushenko should strictly speaking be written Plyushchenko, but sometimes names are simplified in Latin just to make life easier for everyone.

And then on to the Scandinavian names! The -son/-dottir (i.e. patronymic) construction is only used consistently in Iceland, because they don’t have last names. In the other Scandinavian countries people may use it as a middle name, but it's not very common. The male endings -son or -sen were chosen and cemented when last names were standardised and became obligatory some time in the 19th century (I think?). It doesn’t sound weird to Norwegians, Swedes or Danes at all.

By the way, all Russians have patronymics as middle names. It isn’t always mentioned in the West, but in Russian media you may see Lipnitskaya referred to as Yulia Vyacheslavovna (daughter of Vyacheslav), for example. Same for men, her hypothetical brother would be [First name] Vyacheslavovich Lipnitsky.

 

[dorispulaski]

petitebrie, thanks for the very useful information

 

[Snow63]

Alena and Alyona are the same name. It’s written Алёна, however, the umlaut over the e is often dropped in writing. It’s like one of those weird pronunciation rules – native speakers know it’s supposed to be an ë anyway, so they don’t bother to put the umlaut. This is very frustrating for foreign learners, because e is pronounced ‘eh’ and ë is pronounced ‘yo’! Sometimes it’s just transliterated as it is written rather than pronounced, and you get 'Alena' instead of 'Alyona'.

Same for Aljona (Savchenko) and Aliona (as Savchenko's name on her wiki page). In Russian it's all the same.

And bravo, petitebrie.

 

[petitebrie]

You're welcome! Finally I can put my degree in Russian to good use.

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

petitebrie, apologies for not quoting your post as it is rather long, but all I can say is WOW!!!!



Thank you so much for providing the definitive answer for pretty much every topic I had brought up in this thread!

It is so comprehensive, and yet easy to understand at the same time! It is not easy to hit both those targets at the same time, so well done!

I particularly found interesting the second paragraph. I hadn't realised that a lot of Russian names actually meant something. Well, I suppose it's like English family names that are derived from a distant ancestor's job, for example Cooper (barrel maker); Fletcher (arrow maker); Baker (bread maker).

But, I am now really intrigued as to why some people's ancestors got named after animals!

And I feel really stupid now for not working out that "Moskvina" meant "from Moscow". For goodness sake, when the city is transliterated from Cyrillic into Latin characters, it comes out as "Moskva"! It should have been blindingly obvious! I suppose in this respect it is kinda like Arab names, like Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, i.e. Saddam Husein, from Tikrit.

So, the discrepency between the transliteration of Miss Leonova and Miss Savchenko's names is all because somebody left out the umlaut on Miss Leonova's name when writing it in Cyrillic. And the person at the ISU transliterating it into Latin characters was none the wiser that it should have been there.

Oh, leaving out accents is something that REALLY winds me up.

I know we don't have accents in English, but we tend to not include them when typing foreign words for the simple reason that they are not handy to access from a computer keyboard. But including them is so useful when it comes to working out how to pronounce foreign words.

Put it like this - if I ever adopt a skater who has accents in their name, I would make sure to include those accents in the title of their Fan Fest!

The subject of masculine and feminine versions of Slavic names has been discussed many times over the years. But, since Thuridir was mentioned, I thought it would be interesting to look at how a different culture does it.

And although I realised that the custom had largely been abandoned in the Scandanavian countries on mainland Europe, I didn't realise that the custom still survived in the form of middle names. So, thank you for pointing that out.
That they are basically doing the same as the Russians now!

Since you are such a relatively new member, may I also welcome you to the forum. I hope you enjoy your time on here. Because we are already enjoying having you here!

CaroLiza_fan

 

[Snow63]

Bobrova and Soloviev also can be translated by the way... They are Beaver's and Nightingale's respectively

You're welcome! Finally I can put my degree in Russian to good use.

I hope it's not the first time you have put your degree in Russian to good use.

And welcome to the forum, post long and often.

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

Bobrova and Soloviev also can be translated by the way... They are Beaver's and Nightingale's respectively

Oh, poor Ekaterina! I really hope that the meaning of her surname does not become common knowledge in the English-speaking world, as she is going to get some serious stick about it!

(In case you didn't know, "beaver" is no longer just the name for a furry rodent with a funny tail that makes dams. It is also a slang term for something completely different...)

A nightingale sounds like a nice thing to be named after, though.

CaroLiza_fan

 

[Snow63]

Oh, poor Ekaterina! I really hope that the meaning of her surname does not become common knowledge in the English-speaking world, as she is going to get some serious stick about it!

(In case you didn't know, "beaver" is no longer just the name for a furry rodent with a funny tail that makes dams. It is also a slang term for something completely different...)

A nightingale sounds like a nice thing to be named after, though.

CaroLiza_fan

Oh, man! Maybe I should delete my post

Ekaterina Bobrova and Dmitry Soloviev are pronouncing their names here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TszXJku3NYE

They say 'Здравствуйте' (Hello) and then Dmitry pronounces Katia's name and Katia's pronouncing Dmitry's name.
Perfect video for their 'Fan Fest' thread, especially considering almost all English-speakers pronounce his last name the wrong way! That should be changed immediately

 

[dorispulaski]

Very good find! I added it to their OP.

 

[dorispulaski]

@StitchMonkey and @papagena found Jason Brown saying his name.

Quote Originally Posted by StitchMonkey

He says it at the start of this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bxCFDkhl9U

I love old clips like the one you posted... people like to try to make Jason out to be a surprise hit at Nationals 2014.... no he had been simmering for a number of years. He was there for all to see, just not many were paying attention.
Ha Doris you have a choice now! He also says his name in the recent TSL element explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m41l6HqolIg

 

[el henry]

Oh, poor Ekaterina! I really hope that the meaning of her surname does not become common knowledge in the English-speaking world, as she is going to get some serious stick about it!

(In case you didn't know, "beaver" is no longer just the name for a furry rodent with a funny tail that makes dams. It is also a slang term for something completely different...)

A nightingale sounds like a nice thing to be named after, though.

CaroLiza_fan

Beaver College in Pennsylvania changed its name for that reason, although seems a little extreme to me. There are plenty of folks with the last name of Beaver. Ekaterina should rest easy