Talk:Sergei Ivanovich Mosin

Latest comment: 9 years ago by BjKa in topic Pronunciation

Pronunciation edit

The article said: {{IPAc-en|ˈ|m|oʊ|s|iː|n}} {{respell|MOH|seen}}. Now I have several issues with that:
As I understand it, the whole point is, to show people how this Russian proper name should be pronounced correctly. It's defeating this purpose to put in a pronunciation that any American without any knowledge of Russian would natively adopt anyway.
Even worse: The way I read it it especially reminds me of southern redneck drawl. It has nothing to do with Standard American English, let alone Russian.
And finally: Why "IPAc-en"?? I can understand that an Americanized pronunciation may be valid for immigrants, who became used to their names beign pronounced by Americans. One might maybe even argue that the Mosin rifle is so well known among American gun collectors that it might have an established pronunciation – but this article is about the person. And since there is no indication given that Mr. Mosin stayed outside Russia for any significant time, pronunciation of his name should always be given in a Russian way.
The Russian stressed o is much closer to an uo or wo sound than an ou sound. Also the unstressed syllable is short. I would have liked to change the IPA to ['mosin] and the "respell" to MO-sin, but I'm obviously too stupid to do it correctly, and couldn't find a usably concise how-to in the help pages. So for the time being, I have removed what I have argued above to be a wrong pronunciation.
Also I've added the stress diacritic to the cyrillic spelling, as seen in the article ru:Мосин, Сергей Иванович.
--BjKa (talk) 10:33, 25 July 2014 (UTC)Reply