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Well, my Cyrillic full name has only two realistic transliterations, but I have friends who have it much worse. Especially people who has a Cyrillic Ë somewhere
by untech 3y ago
Well, my Cyrillic full name has only two realistic transliterations, but I have friends who have it much worse. Especially people who has a Cyrillic Ë somewhere in their name, because it could be spelled without the diacritic in Cyrillic itself, leading to different transliterations.
Luckily I live in Armenia now, which not only has its own alphabet, but also has a tradition of armenising Slavic patronyms! (Which is fair, I guess, as Armenian patronyms are commonly russified in Slavic countries.)
Anyway, the transliteration of Cyrillic at least is not really standardised in my experience. It used to be worse, with Polish, French and English styles, now it settled on English, but there are a still several sticking points which cause combinatoric explosion of variants. Not to mention that my perspective is centered on Russian, and there is a different standard of transliteration for Ukrainian at least (Kyiv and Kiev are Levenshtein 2 apart in Latin, but Levenshtein 1 apart in Cyrillic), and there is a ton of other Cyrillic languages.
- dontlaugh 3y agoMy perspective is on the experience of an immigrant in an English-speaking country. Greek and Russian friends give their standardised Latin-for-English transliterations everywhere and it works because there's no diacritics and no English speakers bother trying to read the Greek or Cyrillic versions. My own Romanian name being Latin alphabet with diacritics seems to get mangled in more ways, from what we've compared.
- untech 3y agoYeah, look at Zelensky / Zelenskyy / Zelenskyi / Zelenskiy, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy He's also Volodymyr / Vladimir, and it's like with Kyiv: the Levenshtein difference is increased by transliteration. Also, I discovered that Levenshtein himself was from USSR, and that's why he's not Levenstein. Though I would not be surprised if some of his relatives would prefer Levenstein, just like Ekaterina (or Yekaterina?) Schulmann [1] doesn't like to be spelled as Shulman. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekaterina_Schulmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekaterina_Schulmann