MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com wrote:
/m?s'kwa/ is better, I think ({masKUAS.} or {mosKUAS.}, or rather without the stress to make it look better (not sound). Even {myskuas.}). The "o" is said to be pronounced "a" in schools, because they don't know schwa and there is no letter for it, but it is a/o/?/?, or maybe ? (for me, it is more open than schwa, but still not "a").
My teachers and textbooks say that 'o' is pronounced as /o/ when stressed, and as /a/ when immediately before the stressed syllable, and as schwa elsewhere.
Well, they are so relaxed, that it should work automatically - I guess it is the right way to pronounce "correctly". You'd better not use [] in IPA for Russian, or you will spend much time for details. ;-)
I pronounce the capital as /maskVA/. No variant with a /w/ is appropriate. But I'm not a native speaker of Russian.
I'm in Moscow and I think "w" is better than "f" there. ji'a, there is "f", but no "w" in Russian. In the past, English "w" was always translated as "u", so "William" - "Uil'yam" ({u(')iliam})
Leningrad. Only after the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990's did the name revert back to Sankt Peterburg.
I guess I remember that I noticed the last change. The channel #5 was still called "Leningradskiy".
Or the standard language for the whole country. Otherwise even people from that country might not recognize it if the local pronunciation is very different from the standard one.And how widely variant are the dialects of the two cities (we should follow the local one, Isuppose)?
The Moscow (approximation of the north and the south dialects) one affects all others. But at South, "o" is always "o".