Re: [tied] Russian for Homerus

> -----Original Message-----
> From: george knysh [mailto:gknysh@...]
> Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 5:01 PM
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RE: [tied] Russian for Homerus


> ******GK: Just as a small aside on this discussion of
> Russian G and KH for Western H. I know from somewhere
> that some Russian dialects do have the pronunciation H
> (the southern ones e.g. from Kursk and Oryol(?) and
> would have no problem in pronouncing Holmes as Holms
> rather than Golms or Kholms. Has there been any
> discussion as to the possibility of adopting this into
> the standard all-Russian, or are the latter's norms
> too firmly established?

Actually, fricative [G] is treated as a marginal (or "potential")
phoneme by Russian phoneticians; the cultivated norm of Standard Russian
even _requires_ to pronounce this [G] in <bog> and <gospod'> (according
to Russian Church Slavonic norm). I am not aware of the discussion, but
my native speaker's intuition says this could hardly be possible: while
most speakers of Standard Russian would have no problem in pronouncing
fricative [G] (<g> is often due to tradition rather than pronunciational
problems), this sound is -- except those two words -- associated with a
speaker of a southern/southwest Russian dialect, Ukrainian or
Belarusian, often with (sorry) some comic connotations.

Sergei