A Slashdot post that wasn't
You see Russian words ending in "ski" all the time. The Russian word for "Russian" is often latinized as "Russki".
There isn't really a standard way to transliterate Russian Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet that we use; or rather, there are multiple standards that reflect the phonetic biases of the people who invented the standards.
My own last name is a case in point. In Russian, it's spelled "Рабинович". I spell it "Rabinovitch", my grandfather spelled it without the "t", and you'll see the "tch" replaced by "z" and/or the "v" replaced by "w".
Why so many variations? Well, "в" (no, I don't know what it's called, I'm the third generation off the boat) is pronounced like the English "v", but many people (even English speakers) use a convention that originates in Germany, where "w" stands for the same sound. As for "ч"; it represents a sound that isn't even used in English (I myself cannot pronounce it) so whether you use "tch", "ch" or "z" is pretty arbitrary.
(And of course, there's no single standard for pronouncing my name; don't even get me started on that.)
The fun part is that no matter which convention you use, somebody's bound to "correct" you. Phillip Davis wrote a book called <i>Interpolation and Approximation</i> for a very specialized audience of mathematicians. Most of the letters he got about the book were not about his math or his writing, but about his "misspelling" of the name of a Russian mathematician, Pafnuty Lvovitch Tschebyscheff!
(It's exceedingly lame that Slashdot went to all the trouble to move from Latin-1 to UTF8, but still filters out most Unicode characters. Back to original post.)
There isn't really a standard way to transliterate Russian Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet that we use; or rather, there are multiple standards that reflect the phonetic biases of the people who invented the standards.
My own last name is a case in point. In Russian, it's spelled "Рабинович". I spell it "Rabinovitch", my grandfather spelled it without the "t", and you'll see the "tch" replaced by "z" and/or the "v" replaced by "w".
Why so many variations? Well, "в" (no, I don't know what it's called, I'm the third generation off the boat) is pronounced like the English "v", but many people (even English speakers) use a convention that originates in Germany, where "w" stands for the same sound. As for "ч"; it represents a sound that isn't even used in English (I myself cannot pronounce it) so whether you use "tch", "ch" or "z" is pretty arbitrary.
(And of course, there's no single standard for pronouncing my name; don't even get me started on that.)
The fun part is that no matter which convention you use, somebody's bound to "correct" you. Phillip Davis wrote a book called <i>Interpolation and Approximation</i> for a very specialized audience of mathematicians. Most of the letters he got about the book were not about his math or his writing, but about his "misspelling" of the name of a Russian mathematician, Pafnuty Lvovitch Tschebyscheff!
(It's exceedingly lame that Slashdot went to all the trouble to move from Latin-1 to UTF8, but still filters out most Unicode characters. Back to original post.)
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