Pravilniy!:D
I know there is a large Russian community in Los Angeles. Where is it?
It’s spelled govno and pronounced gavno. The first ‘o’ is unstressed, thereby giving the pronunciation of ‘a’ - but not as sharp as a stressed ‘a’ as in akt or the first ‘a’ in sobaka.
'Tweren’t Stalin, but Lenin. His pronunciation was less a speech defect than an affectation - he pronounced ‘r’ more in the Parisian style, which is kind of like a soft gargle at the back of the throat - but in all the anekdoty I’ve read it’s transliterated as a hard ‘g’.
Here’s another ‘soft sign’ joke:
Chto prinyos Khrushchev v nauchnyj kommunizm?
Myagkii znak posle ‘z’.
“What did Khrushchev contribute to scientific communism?
A soft sign after the ‘z’.”
Basically making fun both of his Ukrainian pronunciation and his lack of theoretical insight. Loads o’ yux there.