How is Evgeni pronounced?

Question by Lemonry: How is Evgeni pronounced in the original Russian?
Wikipedia gives me: Yevgeniy. The Russian is: Евгений .

*I know the G is hard
*The pronunciation of the second syllable is ‘GEN’ and not ‘GYEN’, so that syllable must be unstressed, right?
*Is the first ‘E’ pronounced ‘YE’ because it is stressed or just because it begins the word?
*Is the last syllable the one that is stressed, because it has the ‘EE-Y’ combination?

So basically, which syllable is stressed, and why?

Answers and Views:

Answer by dansinger61
Yevgeniy is the typical English transliteration. It is an attempt to represent a foreign language that uses a foreign alphabet into the equivalent Latin alphabet (using English pronunciation). Since the sounds (the phonemes) of the Russian language are completely different from those of English, it is impossible to render any Russian word exactly in English — this rendering is an approximation only.

In Russian, certain vowels are “hard” and others are “soft”. Soft vowels have a “palatized” sound (in English, this is roughly the equivalent of pronouncing a “y” before the vowel).

The “Е” vowel in Russian is soft (its hard equivalent is “Э”). So the first sound in Евгений is “Ye”. The “ге” syllable is “gye”, but since the effect is generally more subtle than that, “ge” (with a hard ‘g’) is a closer approximation. The “ий” at the end would be pronounced “ee-yə” (the upside-down ‘e’ is call a schwa, and represents a non-specific voiced utterance, something like a very short “uh”). The schwa sound is so short that English speakers would probably not hear the difference between “ий” and “и”.

The stressing of the syllables has nothing to do with the sounds of the vowels, nor do the sounds of the vowels have to do with whether they are stressed.

So, the final pronunciation, with accents, is yevGENee. (Hard G).

I hope that helps.

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