Re: OT: Ukraine WH-meeting news coverage

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

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

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?

I don't want to sound like moviePig here, given that scholars figured
out the transliteration and not language police. But there are two
different pronunciations involved because the Ukrainian language is at
least three steps removed from the Russian language.

btw, I just looked up. The Ukrainian alphabet is a variation on
Cyrillic, which I didn't know.

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.

That one I've never understood. Transliterations from Arabic are
inconsistent, but some of that might be transliterations from different
dialects, of course.

Or, every newspaper consulted a different scholar of Arabic for advice
on their style manuals.