The world may be a village, but names are still a local matter. I saw it coming as soon as Tim Russert cornered Hillary Clinton into naming Vladimir Putin’s heir. She dodged, ducked and plunged into the now famous: “Med, vay, deva, whatever”. Nobody thought the worse of her. In fact, it drew one of the few sympathetic murmurs in the debate. Russian names are just not something most Americans can do. And if the blogs and online pronunciation guides I’ve checked are any indication, they never will.
One expert on National Public Radio thought that “Medvedev”, the way Russians pronounce it, is simply alien to the American tongue. But admitting that is alien to the American spirit, so there are many places to seek guidance. The Voice of America offers this phonetic spelling: “mehd-V(y)EHD-yehf”. They also provided a voice recording by a man who tried that — in all fairness, he does a pretty good “yehf”. But it’s not a sound likely to make President Dmitry Medvedev turn around.
I speak Russian and tested some of the prescriptions, and found that I never touch the upper teeth with my tongue nor anything that comes up when I Google “alveolus”. I suppose experts would say that we form our tongues and mouths in a certain way in childhood, and that all but a few oral contortionists are thereby doomed to speak every language but our own with an atrocious accent.
One of the ways we compensate for the difficulty of foreign names is by adopting our own way of saying them. I once worked with an editor who spoke pretty good French, but used only the feminine article “la”, never “le”. Why, I finally asked? “Oh, it sounds SO much more French that way”, he drawled.
By the same token, Maria Sha-RA-pova has become so familiar as Sha-ra-POH-va that the World Tennis Association offers it as the official pronunciation. When I pronounce Putin’s first name the way Russians do — Vlu-DEE-meer — people look at me as a huddling mass still yearning to be American. In English, of course, it’s VLAH-de-meer and it’s BO-ris, not Buh-REES, as the Russians have it.
Russians have their own problems with American names, but the current presidential candidates do not pose a major challenge. Obama leaps the language barrier, and Kleenton and Makkayn are easy. Luckily, none have a “th” in their name, a sound Russians eschew. Remember Margaret Techer?
With time, we will learn to cope with Medvedev. We overcame Khrushchev, adopted Rostropovich and cheer hockey players, ballerinas and tennis stars. Medvedev is as elemental as “medved”, Russian for bear. So: Launch with “med” as in “he’s off his med”; put the accent on the “VEH” as in “venomous”, and trail off with a lazy “dev” with just a hint of “z” and “i”: “dziev”. Altogether now: “Med-VE-dziev”. Whatever...
The New York Times
