Latin transliteration of the Russian language

Wife´s Putin is Putina. Putina is diminutive of whore in Spanish

is this printed in newpapers, said on TV? I know that in France they just say Mme Poutine. (dont change the name according to Russian grammar)

Linguist : yep they use Mme Krouchtchev, Mme Brejnev, Mme Andropov, Mme Tchernienko and Mme Gorbatchev.

But they also use 'Tatiana XXXXX-ova' and 'Svetlana YYYYY-ovna' for ice-skaters or gymnasts.

Mme Khrouchtchev, sorry.

Looking at greg's post, I see that English isn't, after all, the only language that misses the "ye" / "yo" difference (Khrouchtschev, Gorbatchev).

Greg - I guess somehow they are trying to honour the Russians distinguishing females from males in their names. "Mme" adds femininity to the name and then they drop the "-a".

<<Wife´s Putin is Putina. Putina is diminutive of whore in Spanish >>

"Putka" in Bulgarian is a bad word meaning "vagina".

I agre with greg, there are national standards for transliteration, but I don't know of any international one. In Hungarian, for example, words from languages with non-Latin script (Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, etc.) are transcliterated phonetically, according to the rules of Hungarian orthography, based on the way they are pronounced in Hungarian. On the other hand, I do think there is a Russian standard for transcribing their own words into Latin script, at least I suppose there should be, in the same way as the Chinese use Pin-yin. The best way to transcribe Russian texts is to find an approximate value for every Cyrillic letter, also taking into account the way it is pronounced.

Some examples of transcribing politicians' names. :

Putin = As the "t" is palatal, Putyin is a better alternative, but the current English transliteration reflects the way it is actually written in Russian.
Yeltsin = Exactly right, this reflects aproximately the way it is pronounced in Russian, although it is written with just an "E" in Russian, which has the sound value of /ye/. However, I find the French transliteration, "Eltsine", rather weird, because it takes the written Russian form as a starting point, and transliterates it in French fashion, giving just a very vague idea of how it is pronounced. On the other hand, the common Russian ending "-ov" in names is transliterated as "-off" which is how the French would actually pronounce it. "Yeltsin" would better be transliterated into French as "Yeltsine".
Gorbachev = Would be more exact as "Gorbachov".
Brezhnev = Exactly right, it would be desirable to use this letter combination for that particular sound in all languages, but who can deny the right of the French to use their own letter for this particular sound, since they have it in their language, too?
Khrushchev = Almost right, but would be more exact as"Krushchov".

In general, it is true that all languages use a transliteration that suits their own orthographic conventions most, all nations are a little "selfish" in this respect. The specific problem with English and French oprthography is that they have conflicting pronunciations for the same letter combination - the combination "-oy" is a case in point, as in "Tolstoy". I'm not sure how this writer's name is transliterated in French - I guess they use the "i" with the double dot diacritic above it.

"this particular sound" = The /zh/ sound, of course

Also, I am not very familiar with the French way of transliterating Russian names. Actually, I realise from the latest posts that French also has a fairly consistent way of transliteration, but a non-native speaker may be confused when encountering English and French transliterations one after the other, since the two languages use fairly different conventions.

Deborah: >>Speaking of "zhenshchina", Russian textbooks commonly state that the letter represented by "shch" should be pronounced as in "freSH CHeese". But I've never heard any Russian pronounce it that way. I'd say it's more like "freSH SHoes".<<

Yes, that's true, and the same goes for the Russians' national broth, "shchi" (which is pronounced almost the same as English "she"). On the other hand, the official sound value of the letter "sh" with a tail in Russian is a soft /shch/, which of course is simplified in pronunciation into a somewhat prolonged "sh".

As for transliterating women's names ending in "-a", "-ova", "-aya" or "-iyevna", I think this convention should be used consistently, also for politicians' wives, since it is the official one. Thus, not Mme Poutine, but Mme Poutina, or Mrs. Putina in English.

Frances : you're right. It's also a question of 'fashion'. Fr <Ludmila XXXX-ov(n)a> adds more 'exotism', charm and subtlety than *<Ludmila XXXX-ov>. With officials' spouses it's different : there seems to be an extra layer of opaque register (ie : non-written 'rule') implying feminity is rendered through title (Mme or Mlle) rather than name adjusting. It could just be deep-rooted media jargon that pervaded standard language.

"Putin" can't be written in french as this word means "whore"

In reading French newspapers I've always noticed that they "respelled" Putin's name (which would be /pytE~/ in French) to "Poutine" (/putin/ in French), and always thought it amusing that they did so to avoid calling him a whore.

Romanization can be a tricky process for transcribing languages that normally write using other systems. I know Romanization for Korean is always somewhat of a mess, there being several different widely different forms of transcription in common use. The latest official Romanization guidelines set out by the S. Korean government in 2000 do a better job in trying to represent how words are actually pronounced (as compared to doing a literal translation of their underlying phonemic forms as is how their phonemic alphabet represents written Korean...Koreans learn of place assimilation as a natural part of writing their phonemic alphabet) but is certainly not perfect, and diagraphs such as "eo" and "eu" for single sounds [O] and [1] in XSAMPA may seem strange to those unused to the system. If you can read XSAMPA you might be somewhat surprised by how the official Romanization matches up with the actual IPA equivalent.

"na neun pigonhaeseo keopi reul masyeosseoyo"

[na n1n p_higonhesO k_hOp_hi 41l maSjOs'Ojo]

"I drank some coffee because I was tired"

Kirk : if the actual sound of the patronym of the current Tsar de Toutes les Russies is [putin], there is no alternative to writing it Fr <Poutine>. In French *<Putin> would sound like [pytê] ([ê] being here the sound of <vin> = [vê] = En <wine> or <main> = [mê] = En <hand>), not like [putin].

I realize that to match the pronunciation [putin], then French orthography would require "Poutine." However, as far as I'm aware written French doesn't usually change spellings (or, in this case, accepted Romanization) for famous people or political figures' names no matter how they actually pronounce it in French, so I'm assuming the fact that they did it for Putin is almost certainly to avoid the connection with [pytE~]. Conceivably, had [pytE~] not had an undesirable meaning in French, written French would've probably been fine spelling "Putin" but still saying [putin], just like they spell former President Clinton's name as in English while not actually saying [klE~tO~] (or do they? I would assume they would try to approximate it with something like [klinton]), as would be indicated by French orthographical norms.

Once again, I can talk about a somewhat related instance in Korean. South Korea's president Roh's name should actually be "No" under current Romanization, as his name is indeed [no] phonetically. However, he didn't want his last name to be associated with anything negative, "no" of course being perceived a negative word in many prominent world languages, especially English. Accordingly, he chose to have his name be Romanized as "Roh" to avoid any possible stigma with the word "no." Further proof that Romanization can be a tricky business sometimes.

Don't Russians have the standard Romanization system of their own language?