On 2/3/21 6:47 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 2/3/21 4:53 AM, Yaroslav Bilko wrote:
Found the nice video with this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE1f6GUvG5Y Girl's pronunciation is accurate with great comments for English speakers.
Thanks for the link. From that video and its comments it appears that there's not a consensus about whether to pronounce Kyiv's trailing "v" as an English "f", or an English "w". The professor uses "f", but a couple of commenters (and Wikipedia) use "w". Perhaps to a Ukrainian speaker this is no big deal, but in English it matters.
Native speakers in some (IMO most, but I did not make any research) Slavian languages (including mine) pronounce trailing "v" as "f", trailing "d" as "t" and so on. They often do the same mistake when speaking English. If you ask locals, they would most probably pronounce trailing "v" in Kyiv as "f" and they would not notice it until you tell them. It is like "we know there should be 'v' and we write it that way, but we pronounce 'f' because we are lazy to articulate". Just my 2 cents :) . Have a nice day, Markéta