Does Russian have an H sound?
Actually, the English sound ‘h’ – as in ‘Hamlet’ – just doesn’t exist in Russian. Yes, we have our own ‘h’, which transforms into ‘x’ in the Cyrillic alphabet, and then transliterated as “kh” when writing in English again – as in ‘Khabarovsk’. However, it’s much closer to how you would pronounce the Scottish lake Loch.
Why are Russian names spelled different?
When Russian names are transliterated from Cyrillic letters into Roman letters, many different spellings can result due to the different rules of pronunciation for English, German, French, etc. French was the preferred language of educated Russians in the 19th Century.
Why is его pronounced Ево?
Pushkin was setting the orthographic rules for the Modern Russian language, and believed that the pronunciation “-ogo/ego” would become standard and displace “-ovo/evo”, so he spelled that ending as “ogo/ego” in his writings.
Why do some Russian words have no h sound?
Because Russian borrows terms from other languages, there are various conventions for sounds not present in Russian. For example, while Russian has no [ h], there are a number of common words (particularly proper nouns) borrowed from languages like English and German that contain such a sound in the original language.
How do you pronounce the Russian word “а”?
Russian “А” looks like the English “A” and is pronounced as [а] (same as the English [ɑ] in father). It would be enough to stop here and move to the next vowel since [а] is really a main sound for “А”. But there are more shades – “reductions” (shorter versions of the main vowel sound).
What is the most common consonant in the Russian language?
Frequency Rank Letter Frequency Other information 4 И 7.09\% 5 Н 6.78\% The most common consonant in the Russian 6 Т 6.09\% 7 С 4.97\%
How strict are the pronunciation rules in Russian?
The common perception is that the pronunciation rules in Russian are rather strict. In reality, they are very complicated and have many exceptions. Pronunciation of Russian letters varies depending on whether they are stressed or unstressed (in case of vowels ), and also on which consonants surround the letter.