Monday, July 05, 2004

Stress for Success Two days after Maria Sharapova's stunning Wimbledon championship victory over Serena Williams, there seems to be no general agreement on how to pronounce her last name.  Is it Sharapova or Sharapova? The linguistic problem is that Russian, like English, has no rules for syllabic stress.  It must be learned word by word and memorized. The same applies to other Slavic languages, like Czech.  Early in her career, Martina Navratilova gave up on trying to get people to pronounce her name correctly, Navratilova, not Navratilova. To this day, nobody, at least in the West, seems to know whether it's Gorbachev or Gorbachov. It would be so much simpler if they all had names like Putin, Stalin or Lenin -- or even better, Trump. 11:02:17 PM