Re: OT: Russian in ASCII?
| From: | Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Wednesday, January 7, 2004, 8:03 |
|---|
--- Mark J. Reed skrzypszy:
> JFC> The spelling Eltsin is quite popular in French.
>
> CG> I've only ever seen "Eltsine", just like "Staline" and "Lénine".
>
> That makes more sense, considering that <-sin> would come out something
> like [-sE~]; [sin] is closer to the Russian.
>
> But tt seems odd to me not to include some representation of the initial [j].
> The fact that it's implicit in the Russian vowel doesn't mean that you
> should leave it off in languages whose <e> has no such implication. :)
I agree. The ending |-ine| for /-in/ is a typical feature of the French popular
transcription. So far so good. But the purpose of a popular transcription is
writing a name or word in such way that a speaker of in this case French can
read it aloud more or less correctly while following the pronunciation rules of
his own language, and that is why the lack of initial |y-| surprises me.
Initial |e-| is a typical example of a scientific transcription, which instead
aims at disambiguity and correctness, if possible in the form of a one-to-one
transliteration.
NB You can often easily recognise the source(s) of a writer's text by simply
looking at the transcription(s) used. Sometimes you can distinguish
Gorbatschow(German), Khrushchev (English), and Tsjernenko (Dutch) in one text!
Jan
=====
"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed
room with a mosquito."
________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping"
your friends today! Download Messenger Now
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
Replies