4 ms·

Is there really an ambiguity there or is this just a spelling quirk? Like are there any two words spelled differently in Russian that can be mixed up when trans

Is there really an ambiguity there or is this just a spelling quirk? Like are there any two words spelled differently in Russian that can be mixed up when transliterated? I imagine, there's an official transliteration scheme because names in international passports have to be spelled in latin alphabet for reference. Is it ambiguous, too? Even if so, it's probably not to hard to come up with more two-letter combinations to encode every letter of Russian alphabet in an unambiguous way and so that even people who doesn't know the encoding could read it close enough.

forgotmypw17 4y ago
Yes, there is ambiguity if you want to achieve both readability and pronunciation accuracy. If you want to just encode the "data" or just get close (but not exact) pronunciation, you can do reasonably well, though nowhere near as good as Cyrillic. If you want full parity, you just can't. Not unless you rewrite the entire language's grammar and re-teach people how to read Latin script in a way that is very different from how it is read in other languages.
d1sxeyes 4y ago
It's similuh to riting inglish pyoorlee fuhnetiklee. For 'two letter combinations', etc. it's worth looking at languages like Polish and Czech, which are fundamentally Slavic, and look at how the Catholic church had to bend the Latin alphabet to fit the sounds we simply don't have Latin letters for. For example, the Polish 'szcz' (as in the town name Szczecin) can be represented as a single letter in Cyrillic (щ, as another commentor has highlighted). You don't have to look far to find jokes/criticisms about Polish names being 'too full of consonants and not enough vowels'.
yaky 4y ago
Transliteration rules exist, but they change. Me and my sibling have a different latin last name due to this. As an interesting side effect, you can tell Ukrainians by the way their names are transliterated - it’s Iurii (not Yuri), Olha (not Olga), Hryhorii (not Grigori) etc.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

Yes, there is ambiguity if you want to achieve both readability and pronunciation accuracy. If you want to just encode the "data" or just get close (but not exact) pronunciation, you can do reasonably well, though nowhere near as good as Cyrillic. If you want full parity, you just can't. Not unless you rewrite the entire language's grammar and re-teach people how to read Latin script in a way that is very different from how it is read in other languages.

d1sxeyes 4y ago

It's similuh to riting inglish pyoorlee fuhnetiklee. For 'two letter combinations', etc. it's worth looking at languages like Polish and Czech, which are fundamentally Slavic, and look at how the Catholic church had to bend the Latin alphabet to fit the sounds we simply don't have Latin letters for. For example, the Polish 'szcz' (as in the town name Szczecin) can be represented as a single letter in Cyrillic (щ, as another commentor has highlighted). You don't have to look far to find jokes/criticisms about Polish names being 'too full of consonants and not enough vowels'.

yaky 4y ago

Transliteration rules exist, but they change. Me and my sibling have a different latin last name due to this. As an interesting side effect, you can tell Ukrainians by the way their names are transliterated - it’s Iurii (not Yuri), Olha (not Olga), Hryhorii (not Grigori) etc.