Chekov's Accent

[Albertese]

This has bugged me ever since High School, where I took my foreign language class in Russian. The Russian language prominently features "V" (though they chose to draw it "B") yet, there's the running joke that Chekov has trouble pronouncing the "V" sound. Most outstandingly Star Trek IV's "nuclear wessels" and even a joke in the current movie (which I guess I shouldn't spoil, not that it's that big a deal).

This is all the more stupefying since the dude's name is Pavel Andreievich Chekov! Which, after a lifetime of practice, he seems to be able to pronounce. In ST3 when he speaks to Scotty in Russian while observing the alarm in Spock's quarters, he says, "Ya ne soomisyechi, nu vot!" (translates to "I'm not crazy, it's right there!" and he doesn't seem to have trouble with the "V".

Maybe it's just when he speaks English....?

--Alex

 

[Trekker4747]

This has bugged me ever since High School, where I took my foreign language class in Russian. The Russian language prominently features "V" (though they chose to draw it "B") yet, there's the running joke that Chekov has trouble pronouncing the "V" sound. Most outstandingly Star Trek IV's "nuclear wessels" and even a joke in the current movie (which I guess I shouldn't spoil, not that it's that big a deal).

This is all the more stupefying since the dude's name is Pavel Andreievich Chekov! Which, after a lifetime of practice, he seems to be able to pronounce. In ST3 when he speaks to Scotty in Russian while observing the alarm in Spock's quarters, he says, "Ya ne soomisyechi, nu vot!" (translates to "I'm not crazy, it's right there!" and he doesn't seem to have trouble with the "V".

Maybe it's just when he speaks English....?

--Alex

It could just be the English way of saying "V"/how we use it.

 

[Michael]

I guess the real reason, though, is that Walter Koenig was told to ham up his Russian accent, which made it a rather inaccurate version of a real accent.

 

[kitsune]

Did Chekov ever say "wodka" in TOS?

 

[Too Much Fun]

Yeah, I think he mentioned it in "The Trouble with Tribbles" when he and Scotty are drinking in the bar. They talk about what they're drinking and Scotty says Scotch is better while Chekov argues in favour of "wodka". So much stereotyping.

 

[SpokOdo]

Chekov is just a wierd little dude. I like him like that.

 

[Myasishchev]

Chekov has a severe speech impediment. It's probably a good thing he was born in Leningrad, and not Wladiwostok, and that he lived in a time that he could join Starfleet, instead of, say, during the Welikaya Otechestwennaya Woyna against the Nazis, when the closest thing he'd have to join would've been the the Woyenno Wosdushniye-Sily. At the same time, you'd think in the future they could fix this kind of embarassing disability.

In seriousness, I guess it's possible if very, very unlikely, giving the stabilizing forces of a saturating mass media on pronunciation, that Russian might have changed in the intervening two and a half centuries to have switched their V's to W's.

 

[kitsune]

In seriousness, I guess it's possible if very, very unlikely, giving the stabilizing forces of a saturating mass media on pronunciation, that Russian might have changed in the intervening two and a half centuries to have switched their V's to W's.

But the SS Tsiolkovsky (TNG: The Naked Now) wasn't pronounced Tsiolkowsky.

Hmmm. I wonder if Elmer Fudd had any Russian ancestry, and the same disorder, only more pronounced so both r's and v's became w's. "Be wewwy wewwy quiet...I'm hunting Klingons!"

 

[Myasishchev]

^And it's still Admiral Nechayev, not Nechayew, as well.

 

[kitsune]

^And it's still Admiral Nechayev, not Nechayew, as well.

Somehow, I never clued in that Nechayev was Russian...

 

[Christopher]

It's true that Russians have no trouble pronouncing the letter V, but what Chekov does is to invert Vs and Ws -- e.g. "wery vell" instead of "very well." This is something that's occasionally done by speakers of some foreign languages when they speak English -- they know that English uses a W sound where they use a V sound, so they assume that they not only have to do that when speaking English, but must do the reverse as well, using W in place of V as well as V in place of W. Or something like that. It's called overcorrection -- taking a linguistic pattern or analogy farther than it needs to be taken. It's not usually done by Russians, but I've read about it being used occasionally by speakers of other languages (I think Hebrew might be one, but don't quote me on that).

 

[Myasishchev]

I'm trying to think of a Russian word that even has a w sound in it.

 

[Albertese]

I'm trying to think of a Russian word that even has a w sound in it.

You won't find one. Russian doesn't have a "W" at all. It does have a letter that sounds like "oo" (but is written almost like a "Y", but not quite. Almost like "y" but both Capitol and lower case look alike.)

--Alex

 

[Myasishchev]

And New York is spelled with iu, the letter that looks like an i and an o having sex.

I'm trying to imagine how a W would be transliterated. Say someone wanted to write Walla Walla, Washington, in Cyrillic. уалла уалла, уашингтон? Ualla Ualla? The closest otherwise is maybe "ya" and that would sound even more ridiculous. (I also suspect they'd stumble on the "ng." I forget if that dipthong exists in Russian.)

 

[kitsune]

It's true that Russians have no trouble pronouncing the letter V, but what Chekov does is to invert Vs and Ws -- e.g. "wery vell" instead of "very well."

So "W" (as in George Bush Jr.) would be "V"?

 

[3superearthtrek]

I don't think he looked like the original at all

 

[Tomalak]

The w/v thing is more Polish isn't it? I knew a guy called Viktor who was known by all as "Wiktor".

 

[Doug Otte]

In ST3 when he speaks to Scotty in Russian while observing the alarm in Spock's quarters, he says, "Ya ne soomisyechi, nu vot!" (translates to "I'm not crazy, it's right there!"...

Thanks for the translation. Some of us have been wondering what he said since 1984.

Doug

 

[Christopher]

I'm trying to think of a Russian word that even has a w sound in it.

It's not about the Russian language -- it's about a Russian speaker's assumptions about how to pronounce the English language. He uses a V sound in words where he hears English speakers using a W sound, so he figures that when he speaks English he's supposed to do the reverse as well and use a W sound where English speakers would use a V. Hence, overcorrection -- applying a principle too broadly or by false analogy.

True, most Russian speakers don't do that when speaking English, but it's not unprecedented for people to make that kind of mistake when speaking a foreign language.

 

[Deckerd]

If you want to hear an American actor doing a very good Russian accent, see Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises.