Blotchy Sochi
British TV people covering the Sochi Winter Olympics are generally pronouncing Sochi as a rhyme with blotchy:
This is a decidedly un-Russian pronunciation. For one thing, those speakers are using their short British LOT vowel ɔ in the first syllable. But stressed Russian o resembles BrE THOUGHT oː far more. Here is Сочи uttered by several Russians:
In my experience, Russian speakers find it harder to approximate BrE LOT than THOUGHT. I sometimes mis-hear them as a result: for instance, I once thought a Russian was saying talking (which natives pronounce with the THOUGHT vowel) when in fact they intended topic (which natives pronounce with LOT). I haven’t noticed mis-hearings the other way round.
Of course spelling is a major reason for the English pronunciation. Written o doesn’t correspond to BrE THOUGHT before any consonant letter except r. THOUGHT would require spellings like Sawchi, Sauchi or (BrE being non-rhotic) Sorchi.
(The GOAT vowel might be another option for Sochi. My friend and colleague Prof. Masaki Taniguchi works at Kochi University in Japan, and my British colleagues and I pronounce Kochi with GOAT, like coach-y. Americans have GOAT in Sochi, and often use GOAT for orthographic o in foreign names where Brits prefer LOT, e.g. Prokofiev.)
Another difference between the English and Russian pronunciations of Sochi is the final vowel. Russian final unstressed i is pronounced ɪ, resembling the English KIT vowel. Here again are the Russian pronunciations of Sochi:
The Russian final vowel is nicely demonstrated by Russian-born American actor Anton Yelchin, who lays on a thick Russian accent as Chekov in the recent Star Trek films; here he says “Yes Sir, happɪ to”:
Classic Received Pronunciation used ɪ for the final vowel in happy, coffee, taxi, money etc., but contemporary SSB uses the FLEECE vowel. (In fact SSB disallows all short vowels in final position except schwa ə.) Here again are the British pronunciations:
There’s an easy way to help Russians who want to reduce their accent in English, namely by encouraging them to use a vowel more like their final unstressed –ij ий, as in Rimsky-Korsakov Римский-Корсаков:
Unfortunately the familiar transcription used in most dictionaries uses the symbol i in happy, coffee, taxi, money etc., more or less guaranteeing that Russians will mispronounce it, as they naturally interpret it as their final и. The default transcription used in the CUBE dictionary, e.g. happy hápɪj, generally gets better results.
To sum up. If you’re a BrE speaker who wants to pronounce Sochi in the most Russian manner that BrE vowels allow, you should put the THOUGHT vowel in the first syllable and the KIT vowel in the second. If you’re a Russian speaker who wants to pronounce Sochi like a BBC-type speaker, you need to make the first vowel much shorter and more open than the Russian vowel, and pronounce the final vowel more like -ий than -и.
In both quality and quantity, [Russian o] resembles BrE THOUGHT oː more than LOT ɔ.
Indeed, although for me, what makes this type of Russian stressed O stand out from its cognates in non-East Slavonic languages is not so much the vowel itself as the strong labialisation of the preceding consonant. Historically this probably started as a purely coarticulatory anticipation of the rounding for the O, but now it seems quite a bit stronger than that, probably something to do with the alleged phonologisation of the three-way labialised–palatalised–velarised contrast (пот [pʷɔ̝t] ‘sweat’ – Пётр [pʲɔ̝tr̥] ‘Peter’ – пьёт [pˠjɔ̝t] ‘drink.ᴘʀᴇꜱ.ɪɴᴅɪᴄ.3ꜱɢ’; not a proper minimal set, but still…).
I wonder if a current British swoː- wouldn’t have an even more Russian-like effect. (Although [ˈswɔʔtʃɪj] would be rather grotesque, I think.)
Russian final unstressed i is pronounced ɪ, resembling the English KIT vowel.
Yes, and here again, the preceding affricate seems rather peculiar for its pronounced palatalisation [tʃʲ] (some transcribe it as alveolo-palatal [tɕ]).
Yes, but obviously my post was sticking to points that could be made within the BrE phonological system.
Interesting. When I took Russian evening classes in London years ago, the вы of our native teacher was often copied by my fellow students as vwɪj, the velarization being translated into a w cluster. But I don’t remember any of them copying сорок or солнце with swoː-. I do take your point, but in the four Russian Сочи‘s in my audio clip (from the internet), I hear all four Со‘s as within the range of BrE coarticulation. However, the o vowels show very non-English palatal anticipation of the following tʃʲ/tɕ; though not enough, I think, to merit using CHOICE in an anglicized pronunciation.
I found it interesting that despite the BBC speaking in terms of the LAW vowel, the discussion above focusses on the THOUGHT vowel. I appreciate that Wells’s lexical set does not discriminate between the two, but wondered why this is : for me, a native speaker of <Br.E> with a “Home Counties” accent (but not RP), they are two very different sounds requiring two very different mouth shapes.
@Philip Taylor: You’re referring to what Wells calls the “board-bored split”. It’s part of my native phonology too (my “board” is more back, rounded and pharyngealized). I would imagine that the “bored” vowel is the one called for here.
Thank you, DW. I thought more of this while reading (for the first time) John Wells’ “Accents of English 1” [1] in bed last night, and I notice that within the THOUGHT set he includes “taught”, “sauce”, “hawk”, “law” and “broad”, while in the FORCE set he includes “four”, “wore”, “sport”, “porch”, “borne” and “story”. For me (as perhaps for you), “law” and “saw” would seem to be members of my FORCE set (ignoring issues of rhoticity) , while “sport” and “porch” would seem to be members of my THOUGHT set. Does this simply mean that I have a rather non-standard idiolect, or is there more going on here than I understand ?
[1] (off-topic) I have just purchased the “Digital printing” (post-1999) edition of these three books, and am appalled at the (lack of) typographic quality; consecutive lines vary in x-height by at least 1pt; it is as if the text varies from 10pt to 9pt and back again on an arbitrary line-by-line basis. How on earth did CUP allow this to happen ?
It sounds to me as if your incidence is similar to the description of Popular London in Wells (1982). Pronouncing law as lɔə is typically London. Wells describes this as “the THOUGHT split”, but it cuts across NORTH and FORCE as well.
See page 311 (book 2) where he says that board, force and port belong to o: whereas draw, for and pause belong to ɔə.
@Philip I think that dw and Ed have pointed you in the right direction. The basic factor is that THOUGHT and FORCE represent two different historic sources, whereas board and bored have two different structures: a closed syllable in the morpheme board (likewise sport and porch) and an open syllable in the morpheme bore (likewise law and saw).
It may be worth mentioning that the BBC’s respelling system takes rhoticity into account, so that the BBC article mentions SAW-chi, but their respelling of sorbet is SOR-bay. However they intend no phonetic difference for non-rhotic BrE speakers between AW and OR.
May I ask, if you were trying to copy the Russian pronunciations of Sochi, whether you’d be more inclined to use your THOUGHT vowel or your LAW vowel?