Ukraine War Day #829: Taking The Piss Out of Zelensky

Dear Readers:

In the last couple of days the pro-Russia internet exploded with mirth and (well-deserved) mockery against Voldemar Zelensky for his mis-pronunciation of the English word “peace” as “piss”. You can find tons of clips on youtube, here for example, is a Judge Nap clip fast-forwarded to the mark at which Zelensky begins his hilarious appeal to Chinese leader Xi to “join him in the pleasure of making piss”. Hiz Honor struggles hard to keep a straight face as Zelensky with admirable determination mispronounces “peace” as “piss” probably no less than 10 times:

In this Hollywood-quality production (complete with dramatic music) Zelensky stands against the backdrop of a ruined publishing house in Kharkov which he claims the Russians bombed mercilessly, being barbarians and all. (Russian press mostly denies they specifically targeted a book warehouse, while also pointing out the publishing house in question just finished busily burning millions of books written in the Russian language, as part of their Ukrainization campaign.) One can only imagine the cameramen and other production crew struggling not to lose it while witnessing Zelensky performing one of the worst acting jobs in his whole career!

Never since he played the piano with his you-know-what… and hopefully he didn’t do unto that innocent piano what he threatened to do with Xi and Biden…

My loyal readers know that I am not the kind of person who would ever stoop to mocking somebody for their accent. Also, I am not in a position to judge others. However! There is an important lesson here: If you are making an important announcement on the world stage but are not completely fluent in a foreign language, then it would be best to just speak in your own native tongue (which in Zelensky’s case is Russian) and have a competent interpreter close at hand to translate for you. If you feel like you have to speak in English, then be careful around potentially rude words. It’s a kind of vanity on Zelensky’s part to think he is good enough to just get up there and jaw away in English, like an actual world leader. Not with that Boris Badenov accent, no.

A Sidebar In English Phonology

After I finished watching Zelensky’s one-man stage show; and after I finished picking my head, jaw and teeth back up from the floor where they had fallen, I took to pondering: What’s the actual problem here? It’s not like Russian (which, I repeat, is Zelensky’s native tongue) does not have this same long -ee- sound, and in roughly the same phonetic environment. Right off the top of my head I thought of the Russian word письменный with its stress on the first syllable, so that it is pronounced /P’EES-menny/ with roughly that same long -ee- sound (following a softened bilabial consonant /p’/) as in the English words peace or piece. This word that I mentioned as an example means “written”, as in “written language”, from the root /p’isa-/, “to write”. But that’s not important, the important point I am trying to make is that Zelensky was not attempting to pronounce a sound so radically different from anything he has ever known. Like me, for example, trying to pronounce some exotic Zulu clicking sound or trying to wrap my tongue around some deep-throated Kartvelian consonant, or something like that. There is no rational reason why Zelensky could not have been coached to stretch out that vowel a bit more, in order to distinguish the word “peace” from “piss”. My conspiracy theory is that his language coaches did this to him deliberately, told him the wrong thing, in order to make him look ridiculous!

Moving on: My loyal readers know that I never miss a chance to discourse on Scientific Linguistics, especially when there is a lesson to be learned. I cannot claim to be an expert on English phonology myself, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn once, and I do have access to wikipedia, so it is fairly easy to look up the catalogue of English vocalic phonemes.

For those not tutored in Scientific Linguistics, a couple of quick definitions: A phoneme is a unit of meaningful sound that participates in the construction of meaningful roots. The same phoneme can have different acoustic forms depending on its environment, which sounds precede or follow, whether it is at the end of a word, for example. Not every variant of a sound rises to the level of a phoneme. A variant of a phoneme is called an allophone. Every language has probably hundreds or even thousands or allophones, but only a limited catalogue of bona fide phonemes. Some languages can have as few as 5 vocalic phonemes, the standard /AEIOU/. Russian, I believe, just has these five, maybe a couple other outliers (it’s a consonant-heavy language). English, like other Germanic languages, is vowel-heavy, in the wiki piece I think I counted up to 25 vowels in the catalogue, including diphthongs. Like I said, I am not an expert in English phonology, so I don’t really understand this whole diphthong business, but moving on…

The main point I want to make is that English makes a phonemic-level distinction between the phoneme written (in international phonetic symbols) as /ɪ/, the example they give is the word “kit”, but one could also use “piss”; versus the phoneme rendered by the symbol /i/, the example they give is “fleece” but one could also use “peace”. [Ignore English spelling please, it’s hopeless, just go by the International Phonetic Spellings for the appropriate letters!]

The first one mentioned is called the “near-close near-front unrounded vowel“, and the second one is called the “close front unrounded vowel“. The wiki entries show their typical acoustical frequencies, which is overkill, because phonemes are somewhat abstract entities, one degree of separation from physical sounds. I should mention that Acoustic Phonetics is a branch of Linguistics which deals with language at its very lowest level, the acoustical frequencies and properties of sounds. The next level up is phonemics or phonology, which deals with meaningful sounds and starts to get into meaning and the creation of roots, which is the next highest level up, morphophonemics. In general, the levels of language, from bottom to top, go as follows:

• Acoustic phonetics
• Phonemics
• Morphophonemics
• Morphology (=Grammar)
• Syntax (also Grammar)
• Semantics

Or something like that. There are specialists in each area, and one does not necessarily need to study them all. For example, one can happily study Grammar one’s whole life while knowing nothing about acoustic instruments in the laboratory. I should also mention that there are various other sub-specialties such as “Psycho-Linguistics” or “Socio-Linguistics”, or even something called “Forensic Linguistics”, but these fields are mostly bogus in nature.

The Goat In The Boat

But, the intelligent reader may retort, how do we actually know that /ɪ/ and /i/ are actually two separate phonemes, and not just variants, or allophones, of the same phoneme? Well, this is an important question, and an important issue for Phonologists, as they compile catalogues of the meaningful consonants and vowels of a particular language. Not every case is clear-cut, and they can have scholarly disagreements about particular individual cases or outliers.

In this case, however, there is no ambiguity. The fact that there are two completely different words in the same language which differ by just that one sound, means that the sound is a meaningful phoneme (i.e., imparts meaning).

/pɪs/ (“piss”) versus /pis/ (“peace”)

Another rule of thumb, and this is considered the Gold Standard: Rhyming words differing by just one sound, then that sound has to be a meaningful phoneme. For example, “goat”, “boat”, “moat”, etc., these rhymes tell us that the sounds /g/, /b/, /m/ are phonemes, not just variants, or allophones, of some other sound. Linguists of the future, studying that dead language called English, could, for example, read a Dr. Seuss book and, ignoring all the crazy spellings, come up with goodly list of consonantal phonemes, at least, right off the bat. Based on the silly rhymes.

Having brought us through this brief excursion into English phonology, I raise the question again: Why did Zelensky so egregiously mispronounce this word in English? I have a theory, but it veers more into Psychology than Linguistics. See, when people learn a foreign language (or several foreign languages) in adulthood, their brain sort of partitions “native language” into “foreign language” and works on translating back and forth. As opposed to children up to a certain age, who can just seamlessly absorb any number of languages, without having to mentally translate back and forth.

I have mentioned (several times) that Zelensky’s native language is Russian. He learned some English, probably in school, but maybe as an adult. He had to learn Ukrainian when he was already an adult. So his brain sort of lumps “This is foreign” into one section, and “this is native” into another. When he is speaking English, his brain jumbles “all foreign” and he starts to think he is also speaking Ukrainian, so he starts to pronounce words in the Ukrainian manner. And Ukrainians, wouldn’t you know it, when they pronounce that same Russian word /pisat’/ “to write”, they pronounce the vowel more like the “i” in English piss, phonetically it goes something like this: Spelled писати, and pronounced /pɪˈsɑtɪ/, with that same /ɪ/ sound!

In other words, Zelensky’s mini-brain, struggling to utter in English, sort of switched to Ukrainian-mode pronunciation that would be appropriate in that particular phonetic environment.

Well, that’s my theory, at least. Either that, or his handlers and language coach just had a gas trolling him, and watching him make a fool of himself. Maybe he has some enemies who just needed to take the piss out of him!