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One More Look at the Problem of Transliteration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

William Edgerton
William Edgerton*
Affiliation:
University of Indiana, Bloomington
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Extract

In the United States we are saddled with three different systems for the transliteration of Russian, and none of the three is satisfactory enough to replace the other two. The so-called Popular System gives general readers a rough idea of how to pronounce Russian words within the sound system of English, but it does not accurately reflect the original Russian (for example, does voskresenie represent BOCKPeceHbe or BOCKPeceHИe?) The International Scholarly System is exact and simple: in its American variant (which uses x instead of the continental European ch to transliterate the Russian x) each Russian letter is represented by a single Latin letter. It is ideal and widely accepted for works in linguistics and for literary studies that are aimed at an international scholarly audience.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 97 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1989

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References

1. The only serious exception to this that I know of was pointed out to me recently by Daniel Field: Does “poet poet” stand for “noaT noet” or for “ΠoэT Πo3T “?

2. This J-modification of LCS is by no means original with me. Over the years I have run across examplesof it from time to time in the works of various presses, including Victor Erlich's Russian Formalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1955) and Poggioli's, Renato The Poets of Russia (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1960 Google Scholar, both of which use it throughout; and Gustafson's, Richard F. recent Leo Tolstoy: Resident andStranger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, which uses the J-modification only for Russiancitations and bibliographical material but gives all proper names in the Popular System.