h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Two weeks ago you wielded absolute power via Twitter over the BBC's Formula One coverage. After sporadic tweeting over the course of a number of races, Martin Brundle, the lead commentator for the BBC's coverage if Formula One, called you 'someone having a moan on Twitter' and accepted your correction of his pronunciation of the Russian driver Vitaly PetROV's name.

You were ecstatic.

Two weeks later he had changed his mind and this time you were shamed on live international TV.

He'd asked PetROV how to pronounce his name, and come away with the impression that the way that he, Martin**, and every other English speaker says it ('PETrov') was, in fact, correct.

'After all he should know,' he ended triumphantly.*

You can think of a number of reasons for the discrepancy between your understanding of the pronunciation and Martin's.

You are wrong. This is clearly not an option.

PetROV is wrong. Now he has been living abroad for a while. You strongly suspect that he has given up worrying about the mad things English speakers do to his name. If Martin said 'Am I saying this right? PETrov?' you can well imagine him thinking himself lucky that his name wasn't being pronounced 'Peters' and nodding enthusiastically.

Martin is wrong.

Now you do not rule out option two, but in fact you are going for door number three as you would not be at all surprised if the truth is that when PetROV growled 'PetROV', Martin heard 'PETrov regardless. And here's why.

One of the problems people encounter with language learning, when learning a new language rather than acquiring more than one language as a child, is the amount of interference they get from their native tongue.

This is particularly pronounced when it comes to pronunciation.

Theoretically, babies are born with the potential to speak any language, although recent studies show that even in the womb they are picking up elements of what will become their native tongue. It doesn't take long before babies are showing a marked preference towards what will become their mother tongue(s). Even babies' babble is different for different languages.

This means that out of the full range of sounds a human mouth can make, sooner rather than later, they start to fixate on a really rather limited number. And it's not just sounds either, but things like patterns in sentence and word stress and intonation. Babies quickly get used to a particular way of declaiming a language and, and this is the important bit, they start to lose the ability to really hear, let alone produce, nuances in the pronunciation in other languages.

People tend to think it's the individual sounds they need to pay attention to in pronunciation. But while you can have a lot of fun discussing sheets with B on laundry day because Russians do not have a long/ short vowel distinction and tend to pronounce the 'i' and 'ee' in 'trip' and 'tree' the same, mainly all that mispronunciation of sounds does is tip other people off that you are someone with a charmingly other accent.

Word stress is important for comprehension, much more so than the pronunciation of individual sounds. There are some real WTF moments to be had when struggling to work out what somebody who has just put the stress on the wrong syLAble of a key word actually means.

Now stress in English is achieved in three ways. Firstly, a stressed syllable will be louder than other syllables. So far so obvious. But it will also be longer than other syllables and higher in pitch.

This is not the same in all languages. In French, for example, all syllables take the same mount of time to say, regardless of stress.

Russian has a much narrower pitch range than English. Their lows are not as low and their highs are not as high.

This is mainly a problem in intonation, especially as they also change pitch less often in any given utterance.

And what does intonation convey? Politeness, interest, emotion. In particular, in English we show politeness and interest by starting really high, changing pitch often and swooping up to the full height or full low of our range.

Most Russians, then, tend to come across as flat, monotone, disinterested, rude.

It also means that English speakers sound tragically over excited about virtually everything when they speak Russian. Russians habitually think that English speakers are more tired, more excited, more angry, more everything than they actually are whether they are speaking Russian or English.

And that means it is harder for a native English speaker to spot, let alone reproduce, word stress in Russian. They are only doing two and a half of the three things the English speaker does.

It doesn't help that in this case, English two-syllable nouns almost always put the stress on the first one.

Now spotting pronunciation nuances, including word stress, is one of those skills that comes with practice.

You are pretty good at it. You have spent 15 years in classrooms wondering why Kirill is virtually incomprehensible and trying to fix it. That's a lot of time tuning your ear into mistakes.

Martin Brundle clearly isn't.

Not that he should feel too bad about it. He can hear things in the note of an engine that you wouldn't even with a pause button and the volume turned up high.

But given that he might feel a little dubious about accepting the expertise of some pseudonymous Internet weirdo, and because you, obviously feel the need to prove to the Internet at large that you are the one who is right, you have decided to provide him, and the rest of the Formula One presenters with some more, some many more examples of Russian people, commentators, newscasters and random fans saying 'petROV', sometimes quite loudly, in the hope that if it is repeated often enough they will be able to get their ear in.

You would also like them to pay attention to the fact that there's a rolled R and the 'v' sound at the end is much softer, more like an F, than they are expecting.

But you will be magnanimous in victory and give them till the end of the season to get that right.

The video evidence*** is actually here: http://solnushka.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/on-stress-management/

This is because it is all in Russian and you have lost track of the etiquette. Even though you left of the really sweary one. Because they called him Vitaly.

*The race is till up on iPlayer for one more day if people would like to witness your humiliation first hand. The section in question is sometime soonish after the halfway point in the race. No, you are not going to be more specific than that.

**Now you are in an actually back and forth dialogue, you are even more sure that you are on first name terms with Marty.

***It is legal, apparently, for you to splice these videos together to make one long 'petROVpetROVpetROVpetROVpetROV' drone. Something to do with satirical purposes.**** You would appreciate any help on whether it is possible.

****Satirical? Someone on the TV is WRONG! This is deadly serious.

Nobody who is not Italian can pronounce the double consonants correctly first-go either. It took me a long time to realise that this was actually because they (being the English and the Americans, chiefly, in my admittedly limited experience) simply can't HEAR the double consonant, because that's not what we do to consonants in English. The difference between bitter and biter, say, is in the preceding vowel, whereas in Italian it'd be solely in the stress laid on the consonants.

*pontificate pontificate*

PeTROV! There.

BRUN-duhl or brun-DELL?

It's Bru-NEL, darn it!

B4imixevenmoremetaphors

Carp! I got so carried away with the joke, I forgot to laud you, Sol, with the in-depth treatise on how we pronounce the things we hear.

I've noted the nuances you mentioned, but have never yet been able to evince them coherently. This comes from having to practically abandon my native language (German) in order to mold myself to using the language of choice (American) throughout my entire school career. I did, however, take every opportunity to take classes in foreign languages as I grew up, in order to delight in the various flavors of the societies from which they came. Spanish was a fun treat, and French made me feel posh. When I encountered Icelandic, it reminded me of home; Portuguese put me in mind of the Latin roots I'd studied along the way. And when I take the time to "think" about the English I'm speaking, and really "listen" to the ~way~ I inflect and intone, it surprises me again that I actually learned such an odd language.

Oh, to be able to listen with someone else's ears...

B4idigoutacopyofRosettaStone&workonmynativelanguageonceagain

To be fair, I'm better at hearing mistakes in English than nuances in forn languages. Mind you, I can do the double consonant thing in Italian. If I concentrate. I fondly like to imagine.

I can't really hear the difference between 'sh' and sch' in Russian though, and I have no idea how to reproduce it.

It's just that English speakers really can't do stress in Russian names properly and it really is very irritating. (What, you had guessed that you say?)

There's a big difference between anaSTAAAAAAAAAsia and anastasIIIA for example and the former is Just Wrong.

That said, I regularly get both Husband and Son's names wrong because of stress, so it is possible I am taking out my inadequacies on poor old Marty.

Nevertheless. Next qualifying is 12th November and I will be there with my little Twitter placard.

Well done! Stress comes up a lot in http://www.oedilf.com both in cross-Atlantic variations and in limericks using other languages. Currently I'm having the discussion on the word Emmental :

Emmental is a king among cheeses;
Its holes don't result from diseases.
There's Brie and there's Gruyère,
And harder and gooier,
But this universally pleases.

Some workshop editors contend that this doesn't scan well, since the US pronunciation is EM-men-tal. I contend that Emmental is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and they call their cheese em-men-TA-ler, which the rest of us Europeans emulate by calling it em-men-TAL.

Everyone I know calls Nabokov NA-bo-kov, and I did so myself until I saw a clip of him recommending non-Russians to call him na-BO-kov, which is sufficiently near the Russian to be inoffensive.

What do you do about Americanised German names, though? Europeans call the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, though his friends called him Bernsteen.

Eventually you probably have to conceed the point. And I do hope that nobody notices how mangled some of the other drivers' names are on those videos, Hamilton's in particular. Although that's just sounds, which, as I contend, are less important than stress overall.

I'd say naBOkov. Nice to know that I'm doing it right.