Help Needed pronouncing Skaters Names | Page 3 | Golden Skate

Help Needed pronouncing Skaters Names

CaroLiza_fan

EZETTIE LATUASV IVAKMHA
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You haven't seen this old men's hand shiver yet, when talking to a young lady! :drama:

But, I will try ;)

Don't worry, it happens to me too. And I'm still in my twenties (for a few more weeks, anyway!)

So it's not the affects of getting older... it's the affects of being around young ladies! ;) :laugh:

CaroLiza_fan
 

Alex D

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Sep 23, 2013
Russian is one of the most complicated languages in the world.

Haha,

that's what I always say about German too. :D I kind of felt Russian was easy as the word endings were so simple to learn, if you know the rules you can say pretty much anything right and there are also just three tenses if I am right?

That said, I am far, very far from speaking Russian like you do and school Russian is certainly not comparable to real world Russian, Russian that you use all day. Plus, I might make many mistakes that I am not even aware of ^^ like in English :laugh2:
 

CaroLiza_fan

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Okay. Let's agree to disagree. Both versions are acceptable anyway.
Didn't know I'm that obvious. :)

Well, knowing how good Golden's memory is, I think she probably remembered the introduction that Mrs. P gave you at the start of the GP Predictions Game last season:

New to this year's game are Snow63, engineer in Russia by day and Ice Dance scorer by night

Mrs. P has a great way with words. And because the way she introduced the scorers was so cleverly written, it stuck in my head.

CaroLiza_fan
 

CaroLiza_fan

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Haha,

that's what I always say about German too. :D I kind of felt Russian was easy as the word endings were so simple to learn, if you know the rules you can say pretty much anything right and there are also just three tenses if I am right?

That said, I am far, very far from speaking Russian like you do and school Russian is certainly not comparable to real world Russian, Russian that you use all day. Plus, I might make many mistakes that I am not even aware of ^^ like in English :laugh2:

I found German very hard to learn. But, I think that might have more to do with the teacher. The first year I did German (in 3rd Form), we had a brilliant teacher, and I was doing very well. But, for the GCSE course in 4th and 5th Form, we had a different teacher, one that was straight out of teacher training. And, really nice guy though he was, he was not a great teacher.

So, I went from loving the German language to really disliking it. Which was a great shame, given how much I love all things German.

CaroLiza_fan
 
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Snow63

Pray one day we'll open our eyes.
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Haha,

that's what I always say about German too. :D I kind of felt Russian was easy as the word endings were so simple to learn, if you know the rules you can say pretty much anything right and there are also just three tenses if I am right?

It's off topic. The amount of rules in Russian is just unbelievable. And a lot of rules have more exceptions than cases where you can apply that rule. Yes, we don't devide tenses in 'simple, progressive, perfect, perfect progressive', but it doesn't mean they do not exist :) We still have these forms. Each noun should be used in right declension form, and each verb in right conjugation form. And punctuation rules are terrible, too :)
I always had only '4' at school for Russian (we have five grades from 1 to 5, five is the best).

Sorry for off topic.

Edit: and about foreign languages. Even English is difficult to me, although I studied it for 3.5 years at school and later at the University, let alone German :) I guess my mind likes technical science much better. :shrug: My wife studies Spanish now, it looks terribly complicted too :laugh:
 
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ice coverage

avatar credit: @miyan5605
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Feb 27, 2012
... Didn't know I'm that obvious. :)

'Twas meant in a good way as a compliment :yes:.
And I seem to recall that you have been helpful in other threads when questions about the Russian language have come up :).


Well, knowing how good Golden's memory is, I think she probably remembered the introduction that Mrs. P gave you at the start of the GP Predictions Game last season:



Mrs. P has a great way with words. And because the way she introduced the scorers was so cleverly written, it stuck in my head.

CaroLiza_fan

:hopelessness: I wish I could say that my memory was good enough to remember Mrs. P's line, but it was not.
(Although I am secretly ;) hoping that maybe I never saw it the first time b/c I do not play the predictions games.)

In any case, it is a great line, and now it will stick in my head too as a pleasant association with Snow63 -- and with your excellent memory, CL_fan.


... In future, when I make interviews I will ask all the skaters to pronounce their name first, we can then use those files.

Forgot to say Thank You earlier to Alex D for taking an interest in acquiring pronunciation files for GS.
 
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dorispulaski

Wicked Yankee Girl
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Phonetic mostly. But there's exceptions.

I am not surprised. There seems to be some effort made to transliterate Cyrillic to Roman names differently than the ISU does, and I wondered whether the point of the exercise was to achieve a better representation of the way to pronounce the name so transliterated?

Because, of course, all such efforts would be futile, since Roman letters represent entirely different sounds in the many languages the alphabet is used for. Worse, English is really not mostly a phonetic language. American English is even less phonetic than British English. When I was a girl, reading was taught by the whole word look-say method, partially because of the large amounts of homonyms and homophones in English.

Joke example was that "fish" could be spelled "ghoti"
"gh" as in "laugh"
"o" as in "women"
"ti" as in "motion"


And Americans are worse about names than anything else (witness my own relatively simple and not uncommon first name, which has three distinct possible pronunciations in the US alone), because our names originated in family names from different countries for whom the letters represented quite different sounds.
 

Snow63

Pray one day we'll open our eyes.
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I am not surprised. There seems to be some effort made to transliterate Cyrillic to Roman names differently than the ISU does, and I wondered whether the point of the exercise was to achieve a better representation of the way to pronounce the name so transliterated?

Because, of course, all such efforts would be futile, since Roman letters represent entirely different sounds in the many languages the alphabet is used for. Worse, English is really not mostly a phonetic language. American English is even less phonetic than British English. When I was a girl, reading was taught by the whole word look-say method, partially because of the large amounts of homonyms and homophones in English.

Joke example was that "fish" could be spelled "ghoti"
"gh" as in "laugh"
"o" as in "women"
"ti" as in "motion"


And Americans are worse about names than anything else (witness my own relatively simple and not uncommon first name, which has three distinct possible pronunciations in the US alone), because our names originated in family names from different countries for whom the letters represented quite different sounds.

Oh my, yes it's true. I still try to pronounce some English words phonetically, and my English speaking friends just do not understand what I am trying to say. It happens pretty often tbh. Russian is MUCH more phonetic, we still have 'invisible' letters, which we don't pronounce is some words, but you still have a general idea what word it is, even when you pronounces it not absolutely correct way :laugh:

And about transliterations of the names: I have a relatively simple name - Sergey. Easy, isn't it? But no, not so easy. My name in my International passport is Sergei, on my credit card I'm Sergey, and in my international invitation (I needed it to get a business Chinese visa) they transliterated it Serguei. There was another version once - Serghei. I had a LOT of problems with these. In Spain they didn't want to take my card in a cafe, because my name in my passport and on my card did not match!
Same troubles with my last name, but thank God there are only two versions :laugh:

So yes, transliterations of cyrillic names is hell.
 
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dorispulaski

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Why use Sergey with y when the Roman letter Y is so ambiguous?

In German, y is only in foreign words like "yeti"

In English, y is sometimes a consonant and sometimes a vowel. Vowel: cry, try, rhythm
Consonant: yellow, young.

If I had never heard the name before, I am not sure I would guess correctly how to say it.

However, for Sergei, the ei follows the English rule, "I before E except after C, or when sounded as A, as in neighbor or weigh."

So if the pronunciation is Ser´ gay, I would get it right. If not, back to square one.

Modern Russian transliteration to Roman seems to put Ys everywhere, and it is not a helpful change.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet#Archaic_Latin_alphabet

Old Latin had no Y and no J, so in countries feeling a need for one or the other sound, there is no consistency
 
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Snow63

Pray one day we'll open our eyes.
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Why use Sergey with y when the Roman letter Y is so ambiguous?

In German, y is only in foreign words like "yeti"

In English, y is sometimes a consonant and sometimes a vowel. Vowel: cry, try, rhythm
Consonant: yellow, young.

If I had never heard the name before, I am not sure I would guess correctly how to say it.

However, for Sergei, the ei follows the English rule, "I before E except after C, or when sounded as A, as in neighbor or weigh.

So if the pronunciation is Ser´ gay, I would get it right. If not, back to square one.

Modern Russian transliteration to Roman seems to put Ys everywhere, and it is not a helpful change.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet#Archaic_Latin_alphabet

Old Latin had no Y and no J, so in countries feeling a need for one or the other sound, there is no consistency

I have no idea, honestly. But Sergey is the most commonly used version. :shrug:
 

CaroLiza_fan

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Why use Sergey with y when the Roman letter Y is so ambiguous?

In German, y is only in foreign words like "yeti"

In English, y is sometimes a consonant and sometimes a vowel. Vowel: cry, try, rhythm
Consonant: yellow, young.

If I had never heard the name before, I am not sure I would guess correctly how to say it.

However, for Sergei, the ei follows the English rule, "I before E except after C, or when sounded as A, as in neighbor or weigh.

So if the pronunciation is Ser´ gay, I would get it right. If not, back to square one.

Modern Russian transliteration to Roman seems to put Ys everywhere, and it is not a helpful change.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet#Archaic_Latin_alphabet

Old Latin had no Y and no J, so in countries feeling a need for one or the other sound, there is no consistency

Since it seems appropriate to where the conversation is at the moment, I would like to bring in the Greek letter gamma (uppercase: Γ ; lowercase: γ ).

Traditionally, Greek used to be transliterated phoenetically. So, gamma was written in Latin characters as "Y", as it had an "ee" sound.

But, nowadays it is officially transliterated as "G". Which causes a lot of confusion (and cringe-worthy pronounciations of Greek words) amongst foreigners.

Take the Greek word for a female saint - "Αγία". It is pronounced "I-ee-ah", and so used to be transliterated as "Ayia". But nowadays it is transliterated as "Agia", which does not give much indication towards the pronounciation.

Derived from the word "Αγία" is the Greek name for the virgin Mary, "Παναγία" (pronounced: "Pan-I-ee-ah"; old translisteration: "Panayia"; new transliteration: "Panagia"). And from this, you get the male name "Παναγιώτης" (pronounced: "Pan-I-ee-oh-tis"; old transliteration: "Panayiotis"; new transliteration: "Panagiotis).

Which just happens to be the first name of one of the revelations of this season so far: German singles skater turned ice dancer Παναγιώτης Πολυζωάκης!

As his ISU Bio uses the new transliteration of "Panagiotis Polyzoakis", and he was born and reared in Germany, it would be very easy for us foreigners to assume that his first name would be pronounced a German way (perhaps "Pa-na-gee-oh-tis"). Fortunately, his nickname "Joti" (pronounced in German as "Yoh-tee") indicates that he does in fact use the original Greek pronounciation.

Returning to "Αγία", and the Greek name for Saint Barbara is "Αγία Βαρβάρα". This used to be transliterated phoenetically as "Ayia Varvara", but is now transliterated as "Agia Varvara".

As you may have worked out, there is another reason why I chose Saint Barbara. It is because the Green letter beta (uppercase: Β ; lowercase: β ) is not pronounced like a "B" as us foreigners would expect; it is actually pronounced like a "V". In fact, the "B" sound does not exist in Modern Greek, so there is no need for it to have it's own letter.

[To further confuse matters, the Greek equivalent of the letter "N" is nu. And whilst the uppercase version does look like an "N" (Ν), the lowercase version looks like a "V" (ν)].

Because there are sounds in other languages that don't exist in Greek, it can lead to some novel spellings when foreign words are transliterated into Greek, and then back into Latin characters.

For example, the ice rink in Limassol, Cyprus, is located in a shopping centre on Franklin Roosevelt Avenue. In Greek, this is written as "Λεωφόρος Φραγκλίνου Ρούσβελτ", which when transliterated back into Latin characters comes out as "Leoforos Fragklinou Rousvelt".

As another example, one of the streets in Nicosia (the capital of Cyprus) is named "John Kennedy Avenue". In Greek, this is written as "Λεωφόρος Τζον Κέννεντυ", which when transliterated back into Latin characters comes out as "Leoforos Tzon Kennenty".

Which is not too dissimilar to what happens when John Guerreiro's name is transliterated into Cyrillic characters ("Джон Гурейро"), and then back into Latin characters ("Dzhon Gurreyro").

So, it's not just with Russian names that problems can arise when they are transliterated into Latin characters! :drama:

CaroLiza_fan
 
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dorispulaski

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:clap:

I have put it in her OP

(and that's a name I have wanted to know how to pronounce)!
 

iluvtodd

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What is the definitive way to say "Rippon?" Do you accent the first or the second syllable?
 

CaroLiza_fan

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What is the definitive way to say "Rippon?" Do you accent the first or the second syllable?

In one of her earlier posts in this thread, Golden very kindly linked to her answer when somebody else asked the same thing in the Stupid Questions Thread back in February:


Since then, sabinfire has very kindly edited the video down to that one statement, so that Doris could add it to the Original Post of Adam's Fan Fest.

So, there you go. The answer, straight from the horse's mouth! ;) :biggrin:

CaroLiza_fan
 
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borzaya

Final Flight
Joined
Feb 27, 2014
German doesn't seem too difficult for me - though I never really mastered it, but that's mostly because of lack of practice, I think... I studied English at school and then at the university, and German, too, but we were not taught German as profoundly as English; besides, I use English a lot, but have never found much use for German. Though I still can understand a little bit of German, and remember a few poems and songs which we learnt... It's far more easy to understand spoken German than spoken English, by the way.

I like languages, to be honest :) (and the general linguistics, too). The problem is that I start it and then drop it... Had I more patience and diligence I could have known half a dozen of languages by now :bang: Apart from English and German we had a short (just a few months) course of Latin at the university (later, I studied it by myself for some time), some years ago I made a tiny attempt to start learning Spanish... I also studied Serbian once (it was funny and easy, because it has so much in common with Russian). I wrote a course work at the university about J.Tolkien's invented languages - and as there was virtually no information about it in Russian at that time, I used a very profound English site on this subject, and a German-Sindarin online dictionary to prepare it...

I feel it's high time to try again to study Spanish - I like the TDP figure skating videos so much, it would be cool to understand what the commentator is saying.
 

borzaya

Final Flight
Joined
Feb 27, 2014
Which is not too dissimilar to what happens when John Guerreiro's name is transliterated into Cyrillic characters ("Джон Гурейро"), and then back into Latin characters ("Dzhon Gurreyro").
So, it's not just with Russian names that problems can arise when they are transliterated into Latin characters! :drama:

That's true. For example, concerning Yuko Kavaguti's name, I have noticed that before she began to skate for Russia her name had been mostly written at Kawaguchi (according to the standard rules of spelling Japanese names in Latin characters), but now it is almost always written as Kavaguti (because transliterated from Cyrillic letters).
 
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