Recently, one of my students, who is not only studying at the Faculty of Journalism, but also works in television, asked in confusion: "Is it true that the word ibo is pronounced with an accent on the second syllable - ibo? "No, of course not, but why do you think that ibo is the right thing to do?" It turns out that consultants were invited to the TV company (which is quite reasonable), they listen to how the presenters and correspondents speak, and note all sorts of inaccuracies. And then all this with names and surnames is posted for everyone to see under the headings: "heard" and "necessary". This is"on-the-job training". One could only be happy about that.

However, when I saw two pages from this "wall guide", my enthusiasm was somewhat reduced. Of course, there were precise comments: for example, " you can't talk on the water floor or barely go from shock." However, many of the consultants 'demands were at least unexpected: for example," you can't say simple Berliners, because there are no complex Berliners." But the word simple has the meaning of " unprivileged "or" ordinary, unremarkable "("a simple person would never have done this"," he was a simple economist"), this meaning is in explanatory dictionaries, and it is in this sense that the journalist uses the word simple.

But most of the surprising recommendations were related to pronunciation: for the word terrorist attack, only the so - called hard pronunciation (terakt) was allowed, soft pronunciation (terrorist attack) was excluded; in the words survivor (earthquake) and stingy (on good news), the emphasis was given on the first syllable-survivor, stingy.

We understand the desire of linguists-consultants to make TV speech correct, corresponding to the norm. However, it is well known that a norm will be accepted by speakers only if it has a serious justification. For normative recommendations to be reliable, they must take into account not only the language tradition (as they used to say?), but also the peculiarities of the language system and speech practice (as they say today?). Often, conflicts between speech and the norm arise not because "no one knows the norm", but because something changes in the speech behavior of speakers.

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Doubts about the validity of the advice given by consultants prompted me to suggest "difficult cases" to ordinary users of the language, students of a technical university. And here's what happened.

1. How to pronounce the consonant sound firmly or softly in the words terrorist attack and strategy?

terrorist attack strategy

[te] - 10 [te] - 3

[t'e] - 9 [t'e] - 16

2. Say the word. What syllable should be stressed in words?

a) for-18 for-1

b) survivor-0 (earthquake) survivor-19

c) skupy - 1 (for good news) skupy-18

3. Say the word. What sound is pronounced in place of the spelling "e"?

a) carried away-12 carried away-7

b) encouraging - 0 encouraging-19

Of course, this little experiment cannot be considered a justification for the pronunciation norm. Nevertheless, in its results, one can see interesting trends that we observe today in the speech behavior of speakers and which cannot be ignored by the norm. One of these tendencies is speech naivety. Its essence is that the speaker today strives for simplicity of speech solutions ("I want to be simple, and therefore accessible", "the simpler, the better").

The "simplicity" of speech decisions arises on the basis of a widely understood analogy, and this is what we see in the peculiarities of choosing the pronunciation of a word. If in one of the meanings ("to live longer than someone-something-n.") the word survivor is pronounced with an accent on the third syllable, then in the other meaning ("to endure, endure") we strive to maintain the same emphasis. By the way, this possibility is noted in the explanatory dictionary of S. I. Ozhegov and is confirmed by modern dictionaries (see: Short Dictionary of Difficulties. Grammatical forms. Udarenie [Stress], Moscow, 1994). Moreover, if the strict norm advocates insist on a different stress in the word survivor, they should explain how to pronounce this word in other meanings that it has ("to live, to exist for a while. time", "to get into the feelings and thoughts of the depicted character" , etc.). The situation is similar with the word stingy: dictionaries mark as equally possible (and not different depending on the meaning) pronunciation options: stingy and stingy.

A free analogy, of course, can lead to incorrect (from the point of view of the existing norm) options, as, say, in

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the word carried away (correctly: carried away), however, even in this case, we see how, under the influence of analogy, another option is chosen in speech: start - started-started, come-came-came, tell - led - led, as a consequence: carry away-carried away - carried away. Interestingly, there was no other, incorrect pronunciation in the word hopeful.

How to evaluate such speech facts, such speech naivety, the desire to speak more simply? It is clear that the norm is not a fixed phenomenon, it is changing, and those who want to give recommendations on how to speak and write correctly, take on certain obligations. He cannot dismiss the tendencies that manifest themselves in speech behavior. He should not consider his own idea of a strict norm ("my norm") to be the ultimate truth. Finally, it cannot rely on data from dictionaries that were published ten or fifteen years ago. In addition, even if we agree that everyone on radio and television should speak the same way (which is hardly achievable given that different consultants give different recommendations), then such "wall training" is more likely to cause a desire to remain silent forever than a desire to speak correctly.

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