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# Posted 7:24 AM by Patrick Belton

PLAYING WITH ADESNIK: Congratulations, David, on your radio play!

I was just in the process of trying to come up with a witty remark on the fact that David's last name had evolved to 'Odesnik' on the web page of the Boston NPR affiliate, when it struck me - heck, they're actually right! In the transition Odesnik (as in, 18 year old tennis legend Wayne Odesnik) -> Adesnik (as in the 26 year old blogging legend David Adesnik, or the equally legendary biophysicist Milton Adesnik whose age I won't mention as he occasionally lets me sleep on his sofa) to indicate 'someone who derives from the city of Odessa', we have a lovely example of the Russian reduction of unstressed orthographic /o/ to [a], which is a phenomenon that has intrigued linguists for a century and a half once they discovered that it occurs across languages. While on the one hand, Slavic languages and even individual dialects of Russian and Ukrainian differ considerably in how they make these assimilative and dissimilative vowel shifts, we can see, for instance, in English the reduction of intial /o/ in the transition from 'lobe' to 'lobotomy', where it is unstressed, or in Catalan and Portuguese, in the shift of quality of unstressed 'o' to /u/. So 'someone deriving from Odessa' would be spelled 'Odesnik' while pronounced [a]desnik, in the same way that eto and spasibo are pronounced et[a] and spasib[a].

Which is all to say that the folks at WBUR probably either have a wonderfully dry wit or wanted to take extra care yesterday to be orthographically correct.

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