Comments:

1. 

    

   Carl Ratner:

   Another SpellCheck failure. “Enunciation” is the clarity of pronunciation. “Annunciation” is the celebration of the announcement by the angel Gabriel to Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus. If you do not enunciate clearly you could easily mistake “enunciation” for “annunciation.” But to my knowledge, no one yet has celebrated Mary’s enunciation. As to weather “Annunciation Matters,” I guess that depends on your religious beliefs.

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     yelena:

     @Carl Ratner Carl, thank you so much! This is what I get for not fact-checking my posts more carefully. Sometimes I get so overly confident in my English skills that I end up putting my foot in my mouth. Annunciation – enunciation pair is going into my “to ALWAYS check before using” words.

2. 

    

   Bruce Dumes:

   Another wonderful post, Yelena!

   Carl’s rather witty response is entirely correct, although he himself misuses a word. He writes “weather” instead of “whether”, which are pronounced exactly the same, so it is not a matter of enunciation to determine which is meant when spoken. With “weather” and “whether”, only context can give you the true meaning.

   • 

      

     yelena:

     @Bruce Dumes Bruce, I’m glad I have such attentive readers 🙂 Although, in this particular case, the misuse of the word was glaring from the post’s title 🙂 Still, I’m so happy to hear from you all that I’m willing to continue making mistakes in my English in the future (some intentional, others – earnest).

3. 

    

   Rob McGee:

   Ah, Carl beat me to the punch! (I’m not religious at all, but was raised Roman Catholic.)

   Yes, “annunciation” can theoretically mean an ordinary “announcement,” but 99% of the time it refers to Gabriel and the Virgin Mary (and when used in that sense it’s always capitalized and is preceded by the).

   P.S. Checking Википедия, I find that in Russian, “the Annunciation (to Mary)” is Благовещенье Богородицы. However, благовещенье may also be used in Orthodoxy with reference to the birth of Jesus’s mother Mary and the birth of his cousin John the Baptist, and also the appearance of angels to the shepherds when Jesus was born. But the “default” meaning is Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she was pregnant with Jesus.

4. 

    

   Rob:

   When a therapist asks her Девочка, скажи “рыба” (Little girl, say “fish”) she answers with “селёдка” (herring)

   Would иносказание be the correct word to describe this approach? “Circumlocution” — which literally suggests “to speak around” in Latin — would be one possible word in English.

   • 

      

     yelena:

     @Rob Rob, I don’t think you can use иносказание here. Иносказание, in Russian, means an expression with a hidden meaning. It’s frequently used in literary works.

5. 

    

   John:

   Since Polish seems to be a language that prefers “hissing” sounds over “whistling” sounds (at least compared to Russian), I was wondering how Polish sounds to Russian speakers or how a Polish accent (that is, when speaking Russian) sounds.

   Just curious.

   • 

      

     yelena:

     @John John, you’re right on the money with your question! I can’t say for all Russian speakers, but to me Polish (as beautiful as it is) sounds like it’s made up of mostly hissing consonants.

6. 

    

   Jeannie:

   Distinguished and extremely intelligent gentlemen,
   As far as I can tell, Yelena consciously used “Annunciation” to make the title itself a humorous illustration of the point of this blog!
   As to your question, Yelena, the words “мгновение” and “для” inevitably come out wrong when I say them. In general, however, words that are almost identical in Russian and English are the hardest for me. They come out “half Russian” and “half English”.
   Thanks for another terrific blog. I look forward to watching the film.

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     yelena:

     @Jeannie Jeannie, I wish I was consciously using “annunciation” the way you suggested. That’d be very witty of me indeed 🙂 Alas, it was not even a spell check failure. It was totally me not realizing there was a difference between the two words. Век живи, век учись! Yes, I can see how “мгн” could be hard to pronounce. Л and л’ (soft) are notoriously difficult. In fact, my son had to work with a логопед for a couple of months to learn to say them right.

7. 

    

   samonen:

   Understanding, hearing and producing the difference between Ш and Щ is by far the most challenging feature of the sounds of Russian, especially when these sounds occur in close sequence as in, say, пишущий. It should be pointed out that pronouncing Щ presents no difficulty to English speakers (my native language is Finnish with no шипящие at all) or to myself, but Ш certainly does. It has taken me years of keen listening and practice to be able to distinguish the ‘sha’and pronounce it distinctly hard and the following sounds as follows from this.

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     yelena:

     @samonen I am so fortunate to be a native speaker of Russian with no particular articulation problems! The ш/щ example is just one of the potential hurdles. Were you able to understand the words that had these sounds even when you couldn’t tell them apart clearly?

8. 

    

   samonen:

   Yelena, I think I never distinguished words by ш/щ alone and probably still don’t, but I can tell them apart now and produce ш – meaning I can position and curve the tongue adequately. Most English speakers simply ignore the difference and fail to understand what it’s (or what ш is) all about thinking the sound in the word “she” will do. Luckily I started learning Russian at a Finnish “senior highschool” where the first thing was to learn the Russian alphabet and the sounds the letters indicate and their equivalents in Finnish orthography (which is phonetic: a letter of the alphabet stands for a sound, end of story).

   Thank a lot for this blog! It is excellent.

9. 

    

   Rob McGee:

   Since Polish seems to be a language that prefers “hissing” sounds over “whistling” sounds (at least compared to Russian), I was wondering how Polish sounds to Russian speakers or how a Polish accent (that is, when speaking Russian) sounds.

   John, I’ve been told by Russians that although картавить can refer to various difficulties with the [р] and/or [л] sounds (as Yelena defined it), the word is sometimes understood to mean, more specifically, pronouncing the Russian [р] either “Polish style” or “French style” — and it’s stereotypically associated with Russian-speaking Poles, as well as with French learners of Russian.

   Beyond that, I don’t know anything about Polish phonetics, or how the “Polish accent” sounds in Russian.

10. 

     

    Rob McGee:

    As to your question, Yelena, the words “мгновение” and “для” inevitably come out wrong when I say them.

    For мгновение, possibly the best approach is to think of English phrases like “I’m good”, which can help you pronounce the мг combination without a vowel sound between them. This approach worked for me early in my Russian studies, when a college T.A. suggested the sentence “The doves gleefully flew” to help us with the seemingly impossible string of consonants in взгляд!

    Regarding для, I agree that it was (and still is) a hard word to pronounce! Initially, I simply didn’t understand how to pronounce ля (I tended to say it as лъйа, with a hard л followed by jot). But even after I had improved a lot with soft consonants, that д- at the beginning of для gave me trouble — the word often came out as something like тля or кля or гля.

    What helped me a lot was gradually realizing that when you say the soft л, the sound is not only “palatalized,” but the tongue is narrowed from side-to-side. So if you focus on NOT letting your tongue touch the teeth on either side of the mouth, you might find the word easier to say. One exercise I’ve heard of is to try sticking your tongue into a стопка (“shot-glass” — apparently from сто, not from стоп) without licking the sides of the glass!

11. 

     

    Jeannie:

    Rob! THANK YOU SOOOOOOO MUCH! What excellent advice!

12. 

     

    Rob McGee:

    Jeannie — thanks, I’m glad that my explanation made sense! (And I have to admit that sometimes it still comes out as гля when I try to say для, even though I’ve gotten better at it — I just can’t get it right consistently.)

    And, by the way, I’m reminded of a famous Biblical passage from which the word shibboleth was borrowed by English, Russian, and many other languages. Here’s Судей 12:5-6 (Book of Judges) as rendered in the 19th-century Russian Synodal Bible:

    5 И перехватили Галаадитяне переправу чрез Иордан от Ефремлян, и когда кто из уцелевших Ефремлян говорил: “позвольте мне переправиться”, то жители Галаадские говорили ему: “не Ефремлянин ли ты?” Он говорил: “нет.” 6 Они говорили ему “скажи: шибболет” , а он говорил: “сибболет“, и не мог иначе выговорить. Тогда они, взяв его, заколали у переправы чрез Иордан. И пало в то время из Ефремлян сорок две тысячи.

    5 And the Gileadites captured the ford across the Jordan from the Ephraimites, and when someone from among the surviving Ephraimites said “Let me cross,” then the inhabitants of Gilead would say to him “Aren’t you an Ephraimite?”, and he would say “No.” 6 They would say to him “Say shibbolet,” and he’d say sibbolet, and could not pronounce it otherwise. Then they would seize him and put him to death by the ford across the Jordan. And on this occasion 42,000 of the Ephraimites perished.

    (Note that the “synodal” translation borrows heavily from Church Slavonic and is NOT necessarily a good model of usage for Russian learners! And if you’re Jewish or Christian and you want to read the Bible in Russian for religious purposes, there are better, more modern Russian translations available. But in non-religious/academic/linguistic contexts, the synodal translation is sometimes the best choice if you want a “Russian Bible”.)