Last modified: 2024-04-27 by martin karner
Keywords: ukraine | gonfalon | cyrillic |
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(Ordered in the usual Cyrillic alphabetic order; in brackets, where appropriate, the capital’s name in the original Ukrainian spelling, you'll need a Cyrillic font in encoding Win1251 to see them correctly.)
List edited by Victor Lomantsov
Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet but (like Serbian or Bulgarian) with some differences respective to Russian (and unlike linguistically unrelated languages of the former Soviet Union, whose more recent orthography was set in such way that it includes most of the spelling rules or Russian, even when they don't make any sense): The main one is in the value the letters "i", "y" and "i"".
Now, usual transcription to English gives "y" for letter #1, "i" for #2, either "yi", "i"" or "ji" for #3, and either "y" or "j" for #4 (yes, there are inconsistencies here!); however "scientific" script-to-script transliteration (one-to-one, regardless of phonetics) gives "i" for #1, some variation of it to #2, and the previous plus the dieresis sign to #3.
To make things worse, there are separate Russian names for most Ukrainian toponyms, that may differ more than just in orthography: and good example is the capital Kiev, spelt "KNEB" in Russian (with "kee-yev" sound) and spelt "KNIB" in Ukrainian (with "k*yeev" sound – "*" is an accented schwa) – in what would be spelt "KbIN~NB" in Russian, if instead of a assimilated name it would be a simple transcription.
António Martins, 8 July 1999