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
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