Oleg Sobaka

Tomorrow or maybe today or at least this week is Alek Dog's birthday.
He's 1 year. For 9 months I've assumed that ALek is a variant spelling
of an abbreviated form of Aleksander (or Alexander). The puppy (now a
former puppy) also responds to al-EK which I've joked is the Egyptian
form. Recent research suggests that I should have given greater weight
to other indicators, such as the great white cross on Alek's chest. He
is named "Holy", I now suspect. That is, "Helge" in Old Norse but Олег
in Cyrillic languages: "Oleg", but with a South Texan spelling (having
come here from Corpus Christi).

Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg] says:

    Russian pronunciation of Oleg in English is based on
    the transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet, and hides
    three combined quirks of spoken (as opposed to written)
    Russian:

    The stress is on the second syllable. In spoken Russian,
    the initial short unstressed 'O' is pronounced 'A' as
    in 'about', like 'A-lég': however...

    Russian 'л' becomes palatalized before 'е', that is
    with a faint 'Y' sound of 'yeti' after it, but still
    closer to just English "a leg" than to "al-yeg";
    however ...

    A written final 'г' (hard g as in 'gun') is pronounced
    'k', with the correct result 'A-lék'.

    Thus, rather than "Oh-leg", the proper pronunciation
    of Oleg in English most closely resembles the name Alec,
    but with stress on 'E'. But care should be taken, since
    such а pronunciation is valid only when referring to
    Russian males with the name "Oleg".

So, alEK soBAka.


                                           December 20, 2019
олэг собака