Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 March 18

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 18

Transliteration

Why does English not use any diacritics when translating Russian/Ukrainian/Belarusian/Bulgarian names? For example, Воронеж is Voronezh and not Voronež. It hovwever uses diacritics in West Slavic names, for example Košice is Košice and not Koshice. Why does English no transliterate East Slavic names to look like West Slavic names? --40bus (talk) 19:30, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Generally,English doesn't use diacritics. In the examples you gave, Russian/Ukrainian/etc use Cyrllic letters which require transliteration. Meanwhile Slovak (like Košice) uses Latin letters so no transliteration is required. Diacritics on Latin letters may be retained or dropped when such names are used in English, with little or no pattern.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:18, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Finnish transliterates Воронеж as Voronež. I think that due to this, it would be better if Eastern Slavic languages used Latin alphabet. --40bus (talk) 20:33, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Do you have any idea how offensive it is to say that someone else's language "should" do things the way you think they should?--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 21:19, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Or silly, at least. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:55, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Why can't Americans spell things right? Clarityfiend (talk) 00:43, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Maybe something to do with American exceptionalism. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:49, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

It's not just about Cyrillic vs. Latin: e.g. Serbian Niš and Macedonian Štip are transliterated from Cyrillic with a Š; and disputed Pristina lost, in English, its diacritic for [ʃ] altogether. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 08:31, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Serbian is written in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, allowing for a non-transliterated form to be adopted in English (or other Latin script languages). --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:22, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

As far as I have understood, Serbian orthography readapts loanwords as well, mostly to maintain the 1:1 correspondence between its Latin and Cyrillic variants. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:30, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

You ask why Košice is still Košice in English and not Koshice. That's only half the job done. The c in Czech is pronounced -ts-, making it "Koshitse". Most Englishers looking at Koshice, or Košice for that matter, would think the latter part was like ice, the cold stuff.

There's a distinction between transliteration, which is essentially a letter-by-letter recoding, and phonetic transcription, which provides a guide as to how the word should be pronounced. But there's a very murky grey area between the two, leading to all kinds of inconsistencies and continuations of historical inaccuracies. And, frankly, stuff that was just made up out of nothing. Chekhov used to be spelt Tchekhov, until sense prevailed when it was realised that the -tch- group of letters is never used at the start of English words. But we still have Tchaikovsky, Tcherepnin and a few others. The New Grove Dictionary did start spelling it Chaykovsky, but I suspect they've bowed to the inevitable and reverted to Tchaikovsky. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:27, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Our Names of European cities in different languages (M–P) page gives Nis or Nish as the English and French name for Niš, and there are quite a few uses of "Nis" on the net, like this for example. The trouble is that an educated English-speaker might be expected to be familiar with French, German and even Scandanavian diacritics, but that's not much help with Slavic ones. Also, back in the days before desktop computers, adding a diacritic with a standard British or American typwriter would be impossible. Alansplodge (talk) 13:22, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

True. And if they limit their activities to merely converting letters with diacritics into letters or groups of letters without diacritics, they miss a lot of stuff, and create new problems. Turning Führer into Fuehrer is hardly a felicitous exercise. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:04, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Germans occasionally also perform this exercise.^[1]  --Lambiam 10:15, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, if the diacritics are missing, Germans occasionally convert Ä, Ö and Ü to Ae, Oe and Ue. Nothing to do with the word Führer itself (which often just means "guide"), but maybe that was the point. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:28, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

The basic difference between West Slavic and East Slavic with respect to adapting names into English, is that West Slavic uses the Latin alphabet, while East Slavic uses the Cyrillic alphabet. Unless there's a specific exonym, English takes names from languages written in the Latin alphabet letter-by-letter (sometimes including source-language diacritics, often not). By contrast, taking names from languages which use other writing systems allows for more choices -- if you don't like diacritics (and most English-language newspapers in the United States rarely used diacritics before the 1990s), then you're free to choose transcription conventions according to which single Cyrillic letters often become Latin-alphabet digraphs. AnonMoos (talk) 00:07, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

When it comes to transliterating Macedonian, the customs are changing, as English-style ⟨sh zh ch⟩ are replacing the traditional Serbian-style ⟨š ž č⟩. --Theurgist (talk) 22:44, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic does what the OP wants. Double sharp (talk) 10:50, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

It should be only transliteration system of Russian to English. --40bus (talk) 15:14, 25 March 2023 (UTC)