The Agarthan Guide

honestlynotafangirl:

agarthanguide:

I am listening to a podcast that is suggesting that Kiev is not actually pronounced, as I have been pronouncing it my entire life, “key-EV,” but is, in fact, something a little closer to “KEEV.” They then admitted that they were referencing the BBC pronunciation guide, and that they have no…

as a fellow Ukrainian I’d like to hep you out, but the thing is that the correct Ukrainian pronunciation of “Kiev” involves a sound that isn’t used in the English language. The “i” after the “k” is not soft as in “key” but actually pretty hard and the second syllable is spoken a “-yiv.

The Russian pronunciation (and tbh 99,9% of the Ukrainians speak or at least udnerstand Russian) is probably easier to explain. teh first syllable is actually pronounced as “key” and teh second is “-yev”.

Hope, this was helpful :)

Heck yes it was helpful!  I feel like together we just located this strange translation barrier.  Because tonality means something, right?  It communicates ideas to lay different emphasis on words, and that’s part of the final thought.  And the literal sounds that we can and can’t make due to upbringing will determine the concepts that we can convey through our tones in other languages.  Right?

I find this all very fascinating.  It reminds me of this thing I was listening to, where they were talking about lost phonetics.  Like in English, the word “white” is pronounced “WYTE.”  But it originally sounded more like “WHIT-uh.”  But when Anglo-Saxon clashed with Norman French, the result was keeping the British word, but using a more Norman pronunciation.  It seems like there is this learn cultural disconnect in our speech, but not necessarily in our transfer of ideas.

Is that wild?  It is totally awesome to me.  Thanks to honestlynotafangirl for shedding some light on a really interesting topic.