Re: OT: Ukraine WH-meeting news coverage

On Mar 2, 2025 at 10:17:23 AM PST, ""Adam H. Kerman"" <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

I was noticing that certain American newspapers are using the Russian
transliteration "-sky" instead of the Ukrainian "-skyy"

Since both are just Latin-alphabet phonetic approximations, how is either
distinctly Russian or Ukrainian or one more authoritative than the other?

This is reminiscent of the debate back in the 80s over how to spell Muammar
Qaddafi's name in the English language. There were about a dozen variations
going around: Khaddafi, Quadafi, etc. Since his actual name was Arabic, all
the English-language versions were just phonetic approximations of it and none
of them were the "correct" version.