Re: Pronunciation Guide

Allen wrote:

I was interested to see how this guide would pronounce "Gubaidulina". I
asked a person who knew her and his pronunciation matched the
guide-accent on the third syllable, not the fourth as is commonly heard
in the US.

I encountered a person from Poland when checking out at a store a few
years ago. I mentioned that there were some great composers in Poland;
she mentioned Penderecki, which she pronounced so that the first "e"
sounded more like a nasal "a" and the "ck" she pronounced more like "ds"
than "ts". Does anyone have any specific knowledge about this?

That's a bit odd. Polish pronunciation is pretty consistent, the c
sounding always like 'ts' (except in the combinations ch or ci). And e
is always just a short e, so I'm not sure what the nasality was about,
though there is a nasal E in Polish (e with ogonek), which is sometimes
explained to foreigners as sounding a bit like 'en', so perhaps it's
that following N which caused it. The stress, as in almost all Polish
words, is on the penultimate syllable, of course.

These Polish names throw a lot of people. I did encounter a lecturer at
university (a fairly well-known British university) who, rather
alarmingly pronounced Lutoslawski with a -slaw- as in coleslaw :)

(And I spent quite a while trying to work out how to pronounce the
surname of the most unjustly overlooked 20th-century Polish composer,
Tadeusz Baird, since Baird is not at all a Polish surname and sounds
silly if you try to pronounce it as if it were. I'm still unsure how he
ended up with it, though I later discovered that Baird is a surname from
here in Scotland.)

Simon
.

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