Today’s newspapers carry news, based on a report in the science journal Nature, of DNA findings relating to an archaic group of humans, some of whose fossilized remains have been found in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia. (Here’s the Guardian’s version. There’s also an informative article on the “Denisova hominin” in Wikipedia.)
The new human ancestors were named Denisovans after the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains where their remains were found.
The matter was duly reported on BBC R4 in this morning’s Today programme.
But how do we pronounce Denisova and its derivative Denisovan? In particular, where does the stress go? The BBC reporter stressed the second syllable, -ˈnɪs-.
The name of the cave is of course Russian, and is written in Cyrillic as Денисова. It is the feminine of Денисов Denisov, from the name Денис Denis. But the stressing of Russian patronymics ending in -ов (-ov) is notoriously unpredictable.
None of the pronunciation dictionaries I have to hand record the name. But the online resource Forvo does!
(Forvo is a website with sound files demonstrating the pronunciation of a claimed 800-thousand-odd words in 267 languages. Anyone can upload a sound file showing how they pronounce a given name or word.)
A speaker described only as “Female from Russia” pronounces Денисов clearly as dʲɪˈnʲisəf. Isn’t the internet wonderful?
Assuming that this is the regular Russian pronunciation, it follows that Денисова Denisova is dʲɪˈnʲisəvə and that we should anglicize it as dəˈnɪsəvə (or perhaps with dɪ- or de-, or indeed with -ˈniːs-). The hominins, then, are dəˈnɪsəvənz.
This was indeed the pronunciation used by the BBC presenter. Well done the BBC Pronunciation Unit.
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Happy Christmas to everyone. Next posting: 27 December.