[aleph_minus_one]

> Do we say Moscow or Moskwa?

Russian friends taught me that there is no "o" (as the letter is pronounced in Spanish or German) to pronounce in Москва since the о is unstressed. Rather pronounce it as "Maskwa" ("a" letter as in Spanish or German). :-)

[mananaysiempre]

True to a first approximation. A good second one is that a carefully enunciated [ɑ] isn’t correct, either; a schwa [ə] will sound better, so the vowels and the overall rhythm will be similar to the English word bazaar in a non-rhotic accent. Finally, the hard reality[1] is that all of this is heavily accent-dependent: in Vologda (500km from Moscow) you will hear [o] for the first vowel; in Ryazan (200km from Moscow) you can hear [a] ~ [æ]; even in Moscow itself, a radio announcer will say a fairly careful [ɐ] while someone who grew up in the poorer suburbs will have an almost-inaudible [ə] (this is a strong class marker).

The English word Moscow, meanwhile, is itself very interesting: it’s not actually a derivative of the Russian Москва, but rather a cognate, as both of them are derived[2] from different cases (accusative vs. locative or genitive) of the original Old East Slavic (aka Old Russian, aka Old Ukrainian, etc.) name.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akanye

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow#Etymology