5 ms·

I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this d

by usrnm 4y ago

I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this different?

JustinVx 4y ago
Well it’s different as in this case it’s translated from a Cyrillic alphabet. Also, I would be surprised to read Köln in English as an English name exists for the city: Cologne.
- usrnm 4y ago
  So? I'm going to transliterate stuff from Russian with ё from now on, it just looks great. A language is whatever we want it to be, after all
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    You'll hardly achieve anything by it, besides really breaking spellchecking software.
    - iakov 4y ago
      And annoying the language speakers. Pёtr is painful to read. Peter, Pyotr, Peter, Пётр, pick any, but don't mix and match please!
      - 082349872349872 4y ago
        What about the other way? Would it be legit to transliterate the english nickname Pete as Пить? Много городов у вас в России))
        iakov 4y ago
        That is how it is done when translating literature, right? Pete becomes Пит - just like you are pronouncing Pete.
- vkazanov 4y ago
  This is not transliteration. It would be "pyotr" then. This is just using a German letter in an English text based on a purely visual similarity to a Russian letter. This is wrong on so many levels...
  - ul5255 4y ago
    I do not know where the inspiration cam from but that e with inverted commas is not a German letter
    - vkazanov 4y ago
      I have to admit: no idea as well.
neontomo 4y ago
It's different because in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. That said, I also like it, but it means something different here.
- usrnm 4y ago
  You probably meant French, because the word is just borrowed from French, including the dots.
  - coeneedell 4y ago
    In older texts the notation appears on other words like coöperation. Some Americans use dieresis in their names as well (Zoë and Chloë are increasingly common for example). Furthermore the dieresis (trema in French) in naïf is doing the same job as a dieresis in English, so it can be easy to make the claim that we got all dieresis from French, but in reality it seems to have been borrowed from Ancient Greek as late as the 1600s, and gone directly from Ancient Greek texts to the languages that use the notation today (Galician, English, French, Occitan, Dutch)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. You've correctly defined diaeresis, but it's not actually used in English except in articles that get published in The New Yorker. There is a reason the common English name for the diacritic is "umlaut". The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from German. There are some old relics like naïve (commonly spelled naive, now) and Laocoön (again, now usually spelled Laocoon). To the best of my knowledge a diaeresis has never been applied to the name "Menelaus" even though it "needs" one just as badly as Laocoon does. > Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. The diaeresis there really just shows you that the word is borrowed from French, where it has a diaeresis for internal French reasons. (Because, again, English spelling does not include the concept of diaeresis.) It certainly doesn't tell you not to pronounce the word as "nive" (I assume you're referring to the PRICE vowel) -- the ordinary reading of the written vowel sequence "ai" would use the FACE vowel, as in plain, main, strain, vain, tail, wail, pail, sail, mail, plaice, taint, and waive. Note that the Russian letter Ё does not feature a diacritic - the two dots are an integral part of the letter, and it is not related to the visually similar Russian letter E. As noted upthread, it is the iotified form of the letter O. (Russian has five or six non-reduced vowels, but for historical reasons the Russian alphabet has eleven vowels, including a / e / i / o / u plus ya / ye / y / yo / yu.)
atoav 4y ago
AFAIK when going from one language to another you often have known transliterations. Sometimes that can be a mapping from "Ö" to "Ö". For cyrillic a fixed transliteration is both more needed. "o" and "ö" sound different, but even if you pronounced any "ö" as "o" everybody would understand what you meant. This is different for cyrillic where there are many letters where typical western readers wouldn't even know how to pronounce them. A "Щ" would look like a weird "W", but is romanized as "shch" or "sch". Even more extreme examples would be the romanization of japanese.
pavlov 4y ago
Cyrillic letters mostly don’t map to Latin based on visual similarity. If you’re going to use Ë just because it looks the same as the original Cyrillic, then logically you’d also use P instead of R, X instead of Kh, etc.
- culi 4y ago
  english orthography is so fucked up it's kinda fun seeing people desperate try to hold together different conventions loosely mapped to the phonetics they're supposed to represent
int_19h 4y ago
Good transliteration is not arbitrary; it's supposed to make it possible for the reader who doesn't know the original language to reasonably approximate the pronunciation. In your other examples, all the sounds would be considered "o-like" (rather than "e-like") in most languages with a 5-vowel phonology or similar. A reader might not be able to parse the diaresis, but if they say it with a plain "o", it's a reasonable approximation. But then "ё" in "Пётр" is really just [ʲo] phonetically, so it should, ideally, be reflected by "o" or some derivative glyph in transliteration for readers to be able to understand and pronounce it with any semblance of accuracy. Something like "Pötr" would probably be best, actually, since in most alphabets that have "ö", it's used for [ø] or similar, which would give a more accurate approximation of [ʲo] than just [o]. OTOH the Latin "ë" (when present in the alphabet, which is much rarer to begin with) tends to stand for [ə], so it would be most logical to use it to distinguish "э" from "е". Note that this can be treated as a consistent pattern: a diaresis over the vowel inverts its "default" frontness (front vowels become back, back vowels become front) to simulate the corresponding presence or absence of [ʲ]. Thus we can then also write "ä" for "я", "ü" for "ю", and "ï" for "ы".

by usrnm 4y ago

I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this different?

JustinVx 4y ago

Well it’s different as in this case it’s translated from a Cyrillic alphabet. Also, I would be surprised to read Köln in English as an English name exists for the city: Cologne.

usrnm 4y ago
So? I'm going to transliterate stuff from Russian with ё from now on, it just looks great. A language is whatever we want it to be, after all
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  You'll hardly achieve anything by it, besides really breaking spellchecking software.
  - iakov 4y ago
    And annoying the language speakers. Pёtr is painful to read. Peter, Pyotr, Peter, Пётр, pick any, but don't mix and match please!
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      What about the other way? Would it be legit to transliterate the english nickname Pete as Пить? Много городов у вас в России))
      - iakov 4y ago
        That is how it is done when translating literature, right? Pete becomes Пит - just like you are pronouncing Pete.
vkazanov 4y ago
This is not transliteration. It would be "pyotr" then. This is just using a German letter in an English text based on a purely visual similarity to a Russian letter. This is wrong on so many levels...
- ul5255 4y ago
  I do not know where the inspiration cam from but that e with inverted commas is not a German letter
  - vkazanov 4y ago
    I have to admit: no idea as well.

neontomo 4y ago

It's different because in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. That said, I also like it, but it means something different here.

usrnm 4y ago
You probably meant French, because the word is just borrowed from French, including the dots.
- coeneedell 4y ago
  In older texts the notation appears on other words like coöperation. Some Americans use dieresis in their names as well (Zoë and Chloë are increasingly common for example). Furthermore the dieresis (trema in French) in naïf is doing the same job as a dieresis in English, so it can be easy to make the claim that we got all dieresis from French, but in reality it seems to have been borrowed from Ancient Greek as late as the 1600s, and gone directly from Ancient Greek texts to the languages that use the notation today (Galician, English, French, Occitan, Dutch)
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. You've correctly defined diaeresis, but it's not actually used in English except in articles that get published in The New Yorker. There is a reason the common English name for the diacritic is "umlaut". The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from German. There are some old relics like naïve (commonly spelled naive, now) and Laocoön (again, now usually spelled Laocoon). To the best of my knowledge a diaeresis has never been applied to the name "Menelaus" even though it "needs" one just as badly as Laocoon does. > Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. The diaeresis there really just shows you that the word is borrowed from French, where it has a diaeresis for internal French reasons. (Because, again, English spelling does not include the concept of diaeresis.) It certainly doesn't tell you not to pronounce the word as "nive" (I assume you're referring to the PRICE vowel) -- the ordinary reading of the written vowel sequence "ai" would use the FACE vowel, as in plain, main, strain, vain, tail, wail, pail, sail, mail, plaice, taint, and waive. Note that the Russian letter Ё does not feature a diacritic - the two dots are an integral part of the letter, and it is not related to the visually similar Russian letter E. As noted upthread, it is the iotified form of the letter O. (Russian has five or six non-reduced vowels, but for historical reasons the Russian alphabet has eleven vowels, including a / e / i / o / u plus ya / ye / y / yo / yu.)

atoav 4y ago

AFAIK when going from one language to another you often have known transliterations. Sometimes that can be a mapping from "Ö" to "Ö". For cyrillic a fixed transliteration is both more needed. "o" and "ö" sound different, but even if you pronounced any "ö" as "o" everybody would understand what you meant. This is different for cyrillic where there are many letters where typical western readers wouldn't even know how to pronounce them. A "Щ" would look like a weird "W", but is romanized as "shch" or "sch". Even more extreme examples would be the romanization of japanese.

pavlov 4y ago

Cyrillic letters mostly don’t map to Latin based on visual similarity. If you’re going to use Ë just because it looks the same as the original Cyrillic, then logically you’d also use P instead of R, X instead of Kh, etc.

culi 4y ago
english orthography is so fucked up it's kinda fun seeing people desperate try to hold together different conventions loosely mapped to the phonetics they're supposed to represent

int_19h 4y ago

Good transliteration is not arbitrary; it's supposed to make it possible for the reader who doesn't know the original language to reasonably approximate the pronunciation. In your other examples, all the sounds would be considered "o-like" (rather than "e-like") in most languages with a 5-vowel phonology or similar. A reader might not be able to parse the diaresis, but if they say it with a plain "o", it's a reasonable approximation. But then "ё" in "Пётр" is really just [ʲo] phonetically, so it should, ideally, be reflected by "o" or some derivative glyph in transliteration for readers to be able to understand and pronounce it with any semblance of accuracy. Something like "Pötr" would probably be best, actually, since in most alphabets that have "ö", it's used for [ø] or similar, which would give a more accurate approximation of [ʲo] than just [o]. OTOH the Latin "ë" (when present in the alphabet, which is much rarer to begin with) tends to stand for [ə], so it would be most logical to use it to distinguish "э" from "е". Note that this can be treated as a consistent pattern: a diaresis over the vowel inverts its "default" frontness (front vowels become back, back vowels become front) to simulate the corresponding presence or absence of [ʲ]. Thus we can then also write "ä" for "я", "ü" for "ю", and "ï" for "ы".