(no subject)
Jun. 20th, 2004 03:30 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
superslayer18.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
learn_russianWhat would you do if you need to transliterate a W into Russian, since there is no W in the cyrillic alphabet? Would you change it to В (V) or would you put something along the lines of уа (oo-a, not я even though it looks like it)?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:41 pm (UTC)If it's a proper name that became known in Russia roughly before 1900 - W would most likely be transliterated as В (Watt=Ватт, Watson=Ватсон, Winchester=Винчестер, Waterloo=Ватерлоо, etc.). If it is something more modern, expect W=У+any vowel appropriate (Witman=Уитмен, Wells=Уэллс, etc.)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 02:01 pm (UTC)BTW, the above goes with English words only. When transliterating German words with a W, use "в" (e.g., Фольксваген for Volkswagen).
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 06:27 pm (UTC)I think it roots in the fact that during past centuries Russian-English connections were few, except for a short period of anglomania in the first quarter of the XIX century, and English proper names got to Russia through the German and the French. But I'm afraid to go further into that, I'm not much of a linguist. :-))
As for Washington - Helios256 already answered.
P.S. Conserning that enthusiasm about Watson in the thread - the fact is that we have a really GOOD screen verison of Sherlock Holmes stories, I mean REALLY good, acknowledged by the British themselves, so the name comes up every time. :-))
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 07:11 pm (UTC)Prerevolutionary orthography
Date: 2004-06-20 08:55 pm (UTC)І (read “и с точкой”) was used in prerevolutionary orthography for (what is now spelt) и before another vowel or й (русскій, радіо). The ять looks like like a ь with a longer vertical stroke and a horizontal stroke through it, so it looks like a cross with the bowl of a ь on the lower right. (The resemblance to the Christian cross made it very popular among émigrés who wanted to distinguish themselves from the godless Communists.) If your font includes it, it looks like this: Ѣ, ѣ. It’s pronounced identically to е (and similarly palatalises the preceding consonant). To a large extent, you just had to memorise which words had ѣ and which ones had е, but ѣ never mutated to ё, so if you had a word where /ye/ in some forms was pronounced /yó/ when under stress, you knew you could spell it with е. Off the top of my head, I can't remember words I’m 100% sure were spelt with ѣ, but by way of example, words might look like this: “Гдѣ бѣлій котъ?” (I’m not sure those ѣs are correct, though.)
There were two other letters also eliminated during the reform, both of which were only used in words borrowed from Greek. Ѳ/ѳ (read фита, with stress on the last syllable) was pronounced the same as ф, but used in place of Greek theta in words like ариѳметика and Тимоѳей). The other one was Ѵ/ѵ, (read “ижица”, with stress on the first syllable) and it was pronounced the same as и, but written where the Greek word had an upsilon. I haven’t actually seen these words written in prerevolutionary orthography, but I’d expect гѵмнъ (cf. hymn) and гѵпсъ (“plaster”; cf. gypsum) to be written with ѵ. (In case your font doesn‘t include them, фита looks like a Greek theta, and ижица looks like a Roman letter V, except that the upper-left end is usually curled a bit. Because of the resemblance to V, ижица was often used for writing Roman numerals.)
PS — I gather that the sorts of stores that in English would call themselves “Ye Olde DVD and CD Shoppe” are now putting ятьs on their signs in Russia (with no necessary regard for whether the word was originally spelt with ѣ).
Re: Prerevolutionary orthography
Date: 2004-06-20 09:09 pm (UTC)Re: Prerevolutionary orthography
Date: 2004-06-21 12:11 am (UTC)Re: Prerevolutionary orthography
Date: 2004-06-21 05:31 am (UTC)Re: Prerevolutionary orthography
Date: 2004-07-22 06:30 pm (UTC)Re: Prerevolutionary orthography
Date: 2004-06-28 11:00 pm (UTC)write
<font face="Arial Unicode MS, Palatino Linotype, Code2000, Lucida Sans Unicode" >за примѣрное поведенiе и отличные успѣхи</font>
read
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 09:12 pm (UTC)In Russian these letters had survived until the reform of 1918. Mind that it wasn't an invention of the "communists". :-) The reform was planned long before the revolution; the work had been going on since 1904 under the supervision of Grand Prince Konstantin Konstantinovitch and was aimed at simplifying of spelling: some letters were no longer necessary as they no longer represented different sounds, e.g. "i" was pronounced like "и" (it probably had always been - we'll never know *LOL*, but tradition, tradition...) and
Back to vowels. As for Ь and Ъ: in Old Slavonic language (the ancestor of Russian) Ь stood for a reduced front vowel (ergo, marked the palatalisation of the preceding consonant, too) and Ъ - for a reduced non-front vowel. That is, Ь kind of resembled unstressed "и", while Ъ resembled unstressed "ы".
As time passed, these vowels in strong posititon developed, respectively, into "и"/"е" and "ы"/"о", and in weak postiton disappeared altogther - from pronunciation, but not completely from spelling, which depended on tradition and not on phonetics. So, according to the tradition, the letter Ъ was always necessary on the end of the words that ended with an non-palatalised consonant (e.g. to distinguish words like "гладъ" and "гладь" - and in all other cases just to make sure *LOL*), though there was no sound behind it.
Later it was decided that it made no sense, and so, in course of the above-mentioned reform, Ъ on the end of the words was abolished. The letter Ъ (now called "твердый знак") endured in some words, marking certain subtlety of pronunciation when it comes to some prefixes ("объявление", "съехать", etc. - Ъ shows that the last consonant of the prefix is hard, never mind the next vowel which would normally loose it's "й" and make the preceding consonant soft. So, "объявление" is pronounced [абй'ивл'эн'ий'э], while "обязанный" is pronounced [аб'азан:ый']). Or course, "й" affects the preceding consonant, too, making it almost soft, but that's a different matter.
The explanation grows geekier and geekier by the minute - but, luckily, that's it. :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:42 pm (UTC)F.e. surname Watson was transliterated as Ватсон or Уотсон in different translations. Same to William, first letter may be 'В' or 'У'.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:58 pm (UTC)While in literature a single transliteration is used in whole book.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 01:05 pm (UTC)Excluding the officialy approved geographic names, e.g. Washington is always Вашингтон regardless of the fact that it's pronounced much similar to Уошингтон.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-28 11:33 am (UTC)Shakespear's name is Вильям, but Gates name is Уильям. Just a tradition, i think.
P.S. Okay, sorry for my poor english. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-20 12:47 pm (UTC)If you need to transliterate a standalone W, use "в" (e.g., "БМВ" for BMW or "вэ-вэ-вэ" for WWW). Sometimes "дабл-ю" is used.
That's actually a good question...!
Date: 2004-06-20 01:53 pm (UTC)*sigh*
Re: That's actually a good question...!
Date: 2004-06-20 01:54 pm (UTC)Re: That's actually a good question...!
Date: 2004-06-20 02:03 pm (UTC)Re: That's actually a good question...!
Date: 2004-06-20 02:13 pm (UTC)Thanks :)
Re: That's actually a good question...!
Date: 2004-06-20 02:48 pm (UTC)Re: That's actually a good question...!
Date: 2004-06-20 03:02 pm (UTC)To a Russian ear, the English T sounds like the person suddenly started to exhale in a middle of a word, and makes a bunch of sounds around it unintelligible.
Re: That's actually a good question...!
Date: 2004-06-20 06:09 pm (UTC)T vs T
Date: 2004-06-21 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-21 12:32 am (UTC)Sometimes difference between the traditions and the modern trends lead to contradictions - if you imagine a weekly newspaper in some city called Westminster, its name - Westminster Weekly - will become "Вестминстер Уикли" in Russian :)