And yet Johnny, Tara, and Andrea Joyce are also English-speaking, but they stress the "lean". So my point is, if Ilia pronounces his name as "Mal-uh-nin", and that's what he refers to himself as shouldn't others do the same?
Names mean things. Malinin's parents could have decided to call him Elijah instead of Ilia, for him to fit in better. They could have chosen Skornyakov as his last name, setting him up for lifetime of spelling it out and running out of boxes on every form he has to fill out. They likely had to fight a minor bureaucratic battle to have him recorded as Malinin, not Malinina, using his mother's name verbatum, because he is a boy, not a girl. Maybe, if his sister also uses their mother's name, they have to explain why their two kids have last names that sound different from one another to an English speaker.
Maybe he says it differently when he speaks Russian--that's not unusual, because you naturally adjust names when you are bilingual to the flow of the language you are speaking right now. Maybe he anglicises it due to current politics. Maybe, he just got resigned, because everywhere he went, from day one, that's how English speaking teachers and peers said it. I mean, parents rarely refer to their children by their last name.
Ask him, why not?
In the end, malina is maLIna, not MAlina. Ilia can't change that. So, MAH-linin sounds as weird as Eipel'berriiiie would have sounded if Edward Appleberry decided to pronounce his last name that way.
Everyone has to decide for themselves if it sounds like every other Malinin, or if it's special, including Johnny. I know that for me, well, I will go with MaLInin, because for me, in my personal circumstances, it's important to have a symbol of a child of Russian immigrants being a success story.
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Lol the translator for the winners speech really shortened things.
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