Talk:Schwa

Russian final -o

The names Yevtushenko and Chern(y)enko present an interesting case. They are Ukrainian rather than Russian, and Ukrainian gives o its full value, but of course many Russians have Ukrainian names, and presumably follow Russian phonological rules in pronouncing them. The form Chern(y)enko, with its optional y presumably reflects the difference between Russian pronunciation, with y, and Ukrainian, without. It is very probable that Ukrainians would consistently pronounce Ukrainian names according to their own rules, irrespective of whether the people themselves were Russian; I suspect the same would be true of Ukrainian pronunciation of Russian names.

That said, I would omit this. There are so many instances where names in one language are differently pronounced by speakers of other languages, that if every one was noted on a page about a given phone or phoneme, the pages would be cluttered. It isn't really a very significant fact about schwa – I would only use something like this in an article about different nationalities' pronunciation of other nationalities' names and words. Neil Copeland 05:46, 22 February 2010 (UTC)