Awk. Not quite right. See my post on this subject of a few days ago, as
well as my father's own reply in an interview in Speak, Memory, also
posted recently, in which he SPOKE OF* such matters. He and I both tried
hard, but were at a loss, to find an exact equivalent in English. When
it's a matter of life and death, I simply yield to the universally
comprehensible stress on the first syllable.
Sincerely,
DN
* A good example, by chance, of the pronunciation VN accepted and used
in English. He would have BAWKed at "GAWK" and "TALK". To speakers of
perfect Russian the name is no more awkward than, say,"Peeney" is to the
American ear.
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[EDNote: I had remembered, and for some reason couldn't find, DN's
recent post. There are probably certain dialects of English where "awk"
is indistinguishable from Russian "bok" except in length (I doubt that
"awk" or "balk" can ever be quite as short as "bok"). I always felt
that Scots had a very natural accent in Russian (I studied Russian in
Edinburgh for a while), and one version of the (highly various: say,
Dunfermline) Scottish "not" or "loch" strikes my ear as the right /o/.
But in most other mainstream forms of English I know, all /o/-like
sounds are quite distinct from the Russian one. We simply have to
accept the fact that any two languages' sounds--phonemes--don't have
perfect overlap. The funny thing is that the /o/ sound is not
considered one of Russian's "difficult" sounds--of which there are
quite a few. SB]