One subscriber has unsubscribed from this blog in high dudgeon, as the following comment gives witness:”Unsubscribing! You can’t expect that everyone understands Russian phonetics just because you do. I did not subscribe for old-guy-knowitall-syndrome posts!”

As I said in my response to this individual, he evidently misunderstood the thrust of my post, to wit: someone who purports to be a classical music announcer/host on the radio should at least make an effort to discover how names and compositions of foreign composers are pronounced in American English. This applies in spades to those hosts who are monolingual. Accepted pronunciations of names and compositions––whether from Russian or any other foreign language––are readily available in any number of reference books and pronouncing dictionaries. That is the least one can expect as a listener to the radio, whether or not one knows the authentic pronunciation in the source language.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

As regular readers of this blog know, one of Y-H-B’s salient bêtes noires is the mispronunciation of the names of classical music composers and of the titles of their compositions. This morning, on VPR Classical, the entirely incompetent announcer (nomen ist odiosus) mispronounced not only Mikhail Glinka’s forename but the second item in the piece’s title, Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila. He pronounced Mikhail as [mikáyl], to rhyme with derail––a not unheard of distortion in American English of the Russian Mixail—but (more direly) Ljudmila as [ludmíja], as if it were a Mexican version of Spanish double ll! No latitude of aesthethic tolerance will allow for such a colossal error. An ignoramus of this monumental diapason has no business being a classical music announcer/host.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

As many linguists have noted, there is no such thing as perfect synonymy. Any words deemed synonymous will always be distinguished by some subtlety of meaning, including stylistic differences.

An interesting case––though considered beyond the pale in polite speech––is the unique distinction in Russian between the two verbs meaning, on one hand, farting noiselessly (бздеть [bzdet’]) and making a sound during this action (пердеть [perdét’]). Y-H-B cannot think off any other language in which this distinction is extant.

Perhaps this is not so surprising, if one knows that Russian has among the world’s languages perhaps the richest profane vocabulary, for which there are two designations, both featuring the word/base for ‘mother’, viz. мат [mat] and матерщина [matershschína]. In fact, this sector is so rich in Russian that utterances utilizing profanity have come to be differentiated by so-called “stories/floors (R этáж),” so that, for instance, speech studded with numerous and elaborate swear words is called семиэтажная брань ‘seven-story swearing’.

There is an anecdote (related to me by my oldest brother Joseph [1926-2004], who lived for many years in post-war Russia [mostly the USSR] and was employed in different species of work, incl. a railroad-car factory in Nizhny Tagil) that Stalin once tried to ban all profanity from the workplace, but this edict had the unintended consequence of slowing down production and had ultimately to be rescinded. The reason was that workers who were used to calling out objects in the production line by their profane names––the word for penis, R хуй, being the most frequent––had to stop to search for a non-profane term before proceeding. Incidentally, this one item of the Russian profane vocabulary even has the distinction of having an entire dictionary devoted to its array of uses.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The term “repetition compulsion” is associated with Freud and his theory of psychopathic behavior and is defined in Wikipedia as “a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats an event or its circumstances over and over again.” When applied to language use, the term includes verbal tics (phenomena detailed several times before herein). For example, Jacobus Primus invariably begins every conversation over Skype with Y-H-B by saying “What’s cooking?” Such quasi-meaningless repetition is, of course, typical of the beginning of a conversation, when one of the interlocutors simply wishes to essay a variation on openings such as “How are you?”

In large part, the compulsion to repeat oneself linguistically can be classed with anosognosia, defined as a “deficit of self-awareness, a condition in which a person with a disability seems unaware of its existence.” This is a stylistic deficit, resulting not only from a lack of self-awareness but a quasi-pathological reliance on habit where a whole panoply of variants exist in the language and could easily be implemented. To a certain extent, this deficit is concomitant with the advent of the digital revolution and the sway of social media. Clichés of all kinds are definitely in the ascendant in contemporary American English speech, much to the detriment of intelligent conversation.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO