(no subject)

[nursedianaklim.livejournal.com]

This is, perhaps, the stupidest question ever posted here. But it's something I've been wondering about for a while.


Okay, so, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home? Chekhov keeps saying "nuclear wessels" instead of vessels, and as I'm studying Russian now, I'm confused, because it doesn't look like there is a "w" sound in the language. (Unless I am completely stupid.) So what I'm wondering is if this is just absolutely horrid writing on their part or if there is a valid reason why a native Russian speaker would say "wessels" instead of "vessels".




I know, I know, I need a life.

Comments

[oryx_and_crake]

I don't think that a native Russian speaker would do that; however this might be the producers' idea of funny Russian accent. On the other hand, there is a similar moment in the movie "Lost in translation" where a Japanese woman says "Lip my stocking" instead of "rip", the idea possibly being that she is so proud of her ability of pronouncing the "l" sound that is not in the Japanese language that she now puts it everywhere, where it should and where it should not be; possibly the creators of "Stat Trek" were reasoning along similar lines. But this is only a guess.

[melsmarsh.livejournal.com]

My advisor is a native Russian and he says "wessels" not "vessels." The first time he did it, I nearly shot soda out my nose as I wasn't expecting it.

Also the actor who plays Chekhov based the character's accent on his father's Russian accent.

[steppinrazor.livejournal.com]

the idea possibly being that she is so proud of her ability of pronouncing the "l" sound that is not in the Japanese language that she now puts it everywhere

Actually, a lot of Japanese speakers tend to confuse l's and r's, not because they're "proud" but because the Japanese ra/la sound isn't a clear consonant - it really is a hybrid of r and l (just most often transcribed as r). It goes both ways; while Japanese speakers will often confuse the two sounds in their speech, English speakers attempting Japanese will often turn the mora into either a hard r or l sound, which is understandable to Japanese, but not correct (For instance, "arigatou" should be a flipped r/l sound, not an arr arr sound, though many English speakers pronounce it as such).

[wolfie-18.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was about to explain that phenomenon too. It's so weird, because it's not as if English speakers can't say the flap [ɾ], they use it all the time in words like butter [bʌɾɚ] and ladder [læɾɚ], yet when they see the r written somewhere else like arigatou [aɾigatoː], they read the r like a retroflex English r [ɑɹigɑtoː] (not to mention they also usually don't pronounce the [a] correctly...)

[steppinrazor.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that, or they hypercorrect and use the l (had a guy in my Japanese class that'd do that, and he drove me NUTS with all the "aligatou" and "kala"s XD)