Tuesday night had another USA-Russia matchup on ESPN2, with which I was able to add to my list
of trancsriptions of Russian last names as anglicized by (North) American broadcasters.
I got the following new items:
Kalinin → kəlínən
Bryzgalov → brɪ̀zgǽlàf
Kasparaitus → kæ̀spərə́jtəs
Yashin → yášən, yǽšən
Datsyuk → dátsùk, dǽtsùk
I knew the last three already but wanted to add them here since it’s basically the same data set. What’s interesting with this bunch is the vascillation with low-vowel nativization. Bryzgalov and Kasparaitus both consistently turned up with [æ], by both broadcasters. (Gary Thorne, the play-by-play guy, is American; Bill Clement, colour commentator and former associate of the Broad Street Bullies, is Canadian). However, the low vowels of Yashin and Datsyuk are both nativized as you might expect: [a] by Thorne and [æ] by Clement.
The vascillation (on Thorne’s part) is difficult to explain, and follows a more general split among borrowed words in American English: El P[æ]so, m[æ]caroni, and At[æ]scadero versus p[a]sta, dr[a]ma, and t[a]co. It doesn’t appear to be phonologically conditioned. I can imagine some other possible determining factors like source language, reference (e.g, place name or not), or age of borrowing, each of which (I would guess) has a probabilistic effect. Need more data!
Unfortunately (for data collection at least), the Russian team was eliminated, 5-3, so we’ll never know how anyone says Zinetula Bilyaletdinov. The result came about in large part by a 4-goal effort by USA forward Keith Tkachuk, whose last name is nativized by deleting its T: [kəčʌ́k].
Other notes: Clement used a palatal in Vishnevski, and kept the /v/: [vɪ̀nɛ́vski].
Thorne seemed to change his epenthesis/stress pattern for Tverdovsky between last game and this one. Where before it was [tɛ̀vərdórski], stressed like Colorado, now it was [təvərdórski], stressed like of a matter. So do these guys read Phonoloblog? Probably not; he still was saying -dorsky and not -dovsky.
I also have noticed that if you paste a special character from DoulosIPA (the new font) into the “post” window here, it magically converts it to the proper unicode encoding (i.e., &#___;). At first you get a little block for the character, but after hitting “Save and continue editing”, it’s all good. Nice!
On the subject of Keith Tkachuk:
Bob (and others), have you ever noticed how British Columbians pronounce the place name ‘Tsawwassen’ (in English) with the [s] deleted? I don’t think I can do IPA in a comment, so in pseudo-IPA it’s [t3’wAs3n], where [3]=schwa and [A]=script ‘a’. It seems so unnatural to me to delete the [s] rather than the [t]! I can’t imagine an English speaker deleting the [s] in ‘tsunami’.
I’ve heard this place-name many, many times despite being an infrequent visitor to B.C., since Tsawwassen is where you get the ferry for Vancouver Island.
I haven’t ridden enough ferries to have heard of Tsawwassen, but I searched “Tsawwassen pronounced” and got sites such as the following. Apparently, either cluster consonant can be deleted:
_Sawwassen
_Sawwassen
T_awwassen
Either is OK
The only other thing I’ve noticed about British Columbians is how they pronounce ‘Vancouver’, with [ü] as the nucleus of the second syllable.
I did some Googling for things like “Tsawwassen pronounced” too, and I just don’t believe some of the pages. (How’s that for empirical rigor? :) )
But at any rate it’s shocking (to me) that the s-deleting pronunciation is possible at all.
I do, however, believe the pronunciation that seems to be implied by the apparent older spelling Chewasin.
I figured there’d be an older spelling — that’s what I’d been looking for.
I just browsed through the Yahoo dictionary for words starting with “ts”. The dictionary lets you click on the next or previous entry, so I entered tsunami and worked backwards and forwards. The entries also have a “fō-NĔH-tĭk” transcription (which usually indicated ts- is pronounced ts-) as well as an audio clip (which often indicated otherwise).
The sound quality on the clips is pretty poor, so I’m not sure how rigourous this can be, but here’s a survey of the entire ts- portion of the dictionary, indicating what sound appeared to be used for each word-initial “ts”:
tsade: ts
Tsana: t
tsar: z
tsatske: ts
Tselinograd: t
tsetse: s
Tsiaotso: j
tsimmes: s
Tsimshian: č
Tsinan: j
Tsinghai: t
Tsingtao: s
Tsinkiang: s
tsitsihar: t
Tsugaru: t
tsunami: s
tsuris: s
tsushima: t
tsutsugamushi: ts
Tsvetaeva: tsv
Tswana: tsw
If I figure out how to save the clips maybe I’ll do some spectrographic analysis, but I know that sometimes the file compression cuts out the upper end of the frequency range, so it might just be impossible to detect [s] with any reliability – which might account for some of the apparent ts -> t cases I cite above.
I am from B.C., and I would pronounce it “Tawassen” rather than “Sawassen”, though I’ve heard both pronunciations. (Or I might pronounce it “Tsawassen”, with both consonants in the cluster, but that would be a personal oddity.)
Could the pronunciation be influenced by the spelling? People who read a word are more likely to be “faithful” to the first letter than the second one perhaps?