RUSSIAN SPELLING

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2414, 20 March 1915, Page 2

RUSSIAN SPELLING

HOW WE MISUSE IT. The pronunciation of Russian and Polish names which are continually appearing in the war news is a hopeless task to many women at tie present time, and evidently the difficulty is a widespread one. Hamilton Fvfe, ill the "Daily News," says that "there is no 'h' in the Russian alphabet. Therefore the Russians spell Hartlepool 'Gartlepool,' and call Field-Marshal Hindenburg 'Gindenburg.' "The Russian alphabet also lacks our 'j' and our 'w.' Jones has' to be spelt 'Dzones.' Williams. becomes 'Vilyams,' and an American friend of mine named Whiffen is addressed as 'Mr. Veefen.' yet, in spite of these difficulties, the Russians manage to give a very fair, usually an exact, version of English proper and place names. I want to suggest, both out of compliment to them and in the interest of accuracy also, that we should try to turn Russian names into English more correctly than wo do. The reading of war news would; in addition, be made easier to British eyes if the names of Russian places, in any case odd-looking, could be pronounced at sight instead of being puzzled over and given up as a bad job. "There need be no difficulty about reproducing closely in English the sound of any Russian name. Why, thon, do we spell the town which used to be called Lemberg, Lwow? That suggests a pronunciation to rhyme with 'now' and 'cow.' The proper way to pronounce it is LvofF. How 'Lwow' ever camc to be printed I cannot imagine. It is spelt with two 'v's.' Before a consonant the Russian V is hard, like ours. At the end of a word it is slightly softened and should be represented in English, by double 'f.' Whenever V is used, in spelling a Russian name it is wrong, for there is no 'w' in Russian. Where We Go Wrong, "We recognise this by spelling the Polish township where there has been •much hard fighting lately, Lovicz. But here, though we get the 'v' right, we go wrong in the last two letters. The Russian pronunciation is Lovitch. What the Polish pronunciation is I shall not venture to say. No Pole will admit that any foreigner- can ever hope to speak his tongue as it should be spoken. But, at all events, to this I can testify—that the Poles do not make the name of that place rhyme with 'sticks.' As .nearly as may be, they say Lovitch, too, and they say Lenchitsa when they refer to the town which we spell Lenczica. Why, then, should not we? And spell them so too? Cracow should, of course, be Cracoff, but that wo are r.ct likely to alter. Wo have sunk too deeply in the wrong rut. Nijny-Novgorod should be 'Nishni'; and if we cared for accuracy we should write 'Lridzh' or 'Lodsch' instead of Lodz, rhyming with 'rods.' These, however, have become familiar. My protest is against making fresh mistakes. Mapthakers in tho past have adopted local spelling without stopping to asU themselves whether the same letters in English represented the same sound, as very often they do not. "ICieff we spell rightly, as a rule, though there is a perverse tendency to make it Kiev. But we stick to Saratov and Pskov, which turns two soft-sound-ing names to unnecessary harshness; aii<l why we continue to miscall a town which is both written ill Russian and pronounced HarkolT, 'Kharkov,' is more than 1 can tell."