So - shee ? Sah - chee ? So - chee ? Before Sochi was selected as the host of the 2014 winter Olympics , not many people had get word of it , so it did n’t have a widely known English orthoepy . Luckily , the strait in the Russian version have pretty straightforward counterparts in English . The word does n’t have any of the features that make Russian specially tricky for English verbalizer — it ’s not Nazyvayevsk , or Srednekolymsk , or Zheleznodorozhny . Still , there has beena lilliputian uncertaintyabout how we should say Sochi .
The ' ch ' give pause because while we in the main pronounce it as in " cheer , " we bed that in foreign speech it sometimes has a ' sh ' pronunciation , as in " chalet " or " chic , " or a back of the throat pronunciation , as in " Bach " or " chutzpah . " Not to interest though . The Russian ' ch ' ( the Latin alphabet transcription of ч ) is like the English ' ch . ' ( The muddiness about which foreign ' ch ' should be used also leads people to mispronounce " dacha " with the back of the throat sound alternatively of the English ' ch . ' )
The ’s ' is pretty much equivalent to English and the ' i ' is essentially the ' ee ' speech sound of our spelling of alien Word of God like " sushi " and " spaghetti " ; the ' o ' phone , however , is where the equivalencies do n’t concur up so well , resulting in further confusion . The Russian ' o ' is somewhere between the ' atomic number 8 ' we use in " note " and the vowel we use in " caught . " ( If your idiom has thecot - beguile fusion , it ’s further yet from the Russian reading . ) When the ' o ' is in an unstressed syllable , it sounds like ' ah . '
Here is the orthoepy of the stressed Russian ' o ' :
And here is a Russian speaker saying"Sochi . "
The English version has to extract the ' o ' one way ( So - chee ) or the other ( sawing machine - chee or Sah - chee ) . For Russian discussion in English , we sometimes go one fashion ( Olga ) and sometimes the other ( Vodka ) . So what to do for Sochi ? It seems that the more we talk about it , the more So - chee gains impulse in the U.S. However Saw - chee may be picking up backing in the UK . It would n’t be the first time we parted ways on an ' o ' strait in a borrow word . Over there , the ' o ' in cognac and yoghurt is also close to ' aw . '
