Russian language help please

[Alpo]

With Joe's Russian music thread, I was looking at a couple of the performers' names, and wrote down a couple to see if I can figure them out before actually looking them up.

The guitar player at the end of Katyusha. I decided that his name was Alexander. Then I did a letter for letter translation and came up with Aleksandr.  His last name though - Mesbko. Between the S and the K - what looks like a lowercase b - is a "soft sound". If the upright of the b had a little tail on it pointing backwards, it would be a "hard sound". But the site I found that was interpreting the letters did not explain (at least so I could understand) what a hard sound and a soft sound were. I'm not sure whether the s or the k is supposed to be soft, and how you would make them soft. Would a soft s sound like a z?

 

A little help?

 

[Subdeacon Joe]

 

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

So you mean  Месько?  It mean the ess (с) is soft. Not a big deal because you won’t get it right anyway.

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

You will never hear someone say, “you called Sasha ‘Меско’, it is ‘месько’, try to get it right.”

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

17 minutes ago, Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 said:

You will never hear someone say, “you called Sasha ‘Меско’, it is ‘месько’, try to get it right.”

From elsewhere the ь (called "soft sign") silent, palatalizesthe preceding consonant (if phonologically possible)

[Alpo]

So this is going to be like Spanish, where when I say the word "but" (pero) or the word "dog" (perro), no one will know which one I mean because I am unable to roll my Rs to pronounce that double R in perro.

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

I often wondered about that “unable to roll you rrrrrr’s,” really?

[Alpo]

Yeah, really. It's like Japanese people having trouble with the L sound. There is no L sound in Japanese, so they did not grow up learning to make that, and as adults their tongue does not want to make that noise. Or Germans with W.

 

Or Yankees with y'all.

[Loophole LaRue, SASS #51438]

32 minutes ago, Alpo said:

Yeah, really. It's like Japanese people having trouble with the L sound. There is no L sound in Japanese, so they did not grow up learning to make that, and as adults their tongue does not want to make that noise. Or Germans with W.

 

Or Yankees with y'all.

 

We Yankees have absolutely no difficulty saying "yawl", except we are referring to our yachts, not a bastardized contraction of "you all".

 

 

LL

[Alpo]

The bastardized contraction of you all is "you'ns", which I believe is pronounced like "nuns" except with a Y.

[Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619]

It's true that if you can't roll Rs you'll have trouble with Spanish and some other lingos, too. 

It's just a matter of practice.