Re: A perfect day for introducing myself

Wow! so many greetings!

Trying to reply in chronological order...

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000 13:18:07 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<Christophe.Grandsire@...> wrote:

>>My first name is Vasiliy (I believe it should be pronounced vuh-SEE-lee
>>in English). My surname is Chernov (approximately, cheer-NAWF; rolled
>>'r', please ;) ). Like all Russians, I also have a patronymic (not
>>exactly a middle name, by no means a part of the surname): Yevgenyevich
>>(hard 'g', stress on -gen-). I don't expect to hear it often, though.
>>
>
>As a Frenchman with a little knowledge of other languages, I would
>pronounce: [va'sili jEv'genevitS tSEr'nof], following your stress pattern,
>and rolling the 'r' (as I always do when I try another language, except
>English and German in fact :) ). What is the exact Russian pronunciation?
[vas'íl'ij jEvg'Én'jEv'iC' C'Ernóf]. Do you see the diacritics?
Apostrophe denotes palatalization of the preceding consonant
(non-phonological in [C] = [t_S]). Atonic [a] is often transcribed
with the same sign as the English vowel in *cut* or *luck*.

I believe that [ij] is more or less like in the French *fille*, and for
me, French *gn* in *signal* sounds very much like Russian [n']. But it
may be different for a French speaker, since in fact the articulations
differ a lot (AFAIK ;) ).

Do you preserve non-final stress in foreign names when speaking French?

>>All this began when, still a schoolboy, I realized that English has a
>>fixed word order and fails to distinguish verbal aspects. I found this
>>so inconvenient that I immediately reformed it (by introducing
>>declinable articles and profoundly reforming the tense system).
>>
>Interesting idea, it looks like putting a little of German in English :) .
Don't expect too much: I was still a child then, having very superficial
impression about English (the type of English that used to be taught in
Soviet schools, by teachers who'd hardly ever talked with any native
speakers ;) )

No, I didn't think of German. The definite article had the accusative
case, *thek* (I had read a high school manual where some phrases in Old
English were adduced for illustration, and I noticed the pronominal
accusative forms in *-c*; I can't recall if I really thought of language
evolution, however). The indefinite article was used only in accusative,
both in singular *and plural*. Both articles were also obligatory with
other determinatives (*the my friend*), except demonstratives which had
their own accusative forms (I can't recall them, but it seems that they
ended in *-k*, too). English 'zero' article (with abstact nouns, etc.)
was mostly replaced with the definite one.

There were also some contractions of articles with prepositions (mainly
with those translated into Russian using simple case forms).

Ultimately this system evolved to the type of English I use now ;)

>        Thanks. I will send a post about nominal classes in Itakian today,
> so that
> you're gonna have something to *argue* with me :) .
Thanks! I'll reply later in *that* thread.


Basilius,
wondering if his present-day English can be considered a highly
elaborated conlang ;)