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Romanization of Russian
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The romanization of the Russian alphabet is the process of transliterating the Russian language from the Cyrillic alphabet and into the Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet and other Latin alphabets in particular (and sometimes non-Latin alphabets). Such transliteration is necessary for writing Russian names and other words in the alphabet of one's own language.
Romanization is also essential for the input of Russian text into computer by users who either do not have a keyboard or word processor set up for input of Cyrillic, or else they are not capable of typing rapidly on the distinct Cyrillic keyboard. In the latter case, they would type using a system of transliteration fitted for their Keyboard layout, such as for English QWERTY keyboards, and then use an automated tool to convert the text into Cyrillic.
Systematic transliterations of Cyrillic to LatinNote that many phonetic transcription systems are intended for readers of a particular language audience, as the letters of the Latin alphabet differs, and are being used differently, in each language using the Latin script. For instance Russian „???????“ = “Voronin” in English, Czech or Spanish, «Voronine» in French and „Woronin“ in German or Polish.
Scientific transliteration
Scientific transliteration, also known as the International Scholarly System, is a system that has been used in linguistics since the 19th century. It is based on the Czech alphabet and formed the basis of the GOST and ISO systems.
GOST
GOST 16876 (1971)
Developed by the National Administration for Geodesy and Cartography at the USSR Council of Ministers, GOST 16876-71 has been in service for over 30 years and is the only romanization system that does not use diacritics. Replaced by GOST 7.79-2000.
GOST ST SEV 1362 (1978)This standard is an equivalent of GOST 16876-71. Adopted as an official standard of the COMECON.
GOST 7.79 (2002)GOST 7.79-2000 System of Standards on Information, Librarianship, and Publishing – Rules for Transliteration of the Cyrillic Characters Using the Latin Alphabet is the newest document on transliteration in the series of GOST standards. This standard is an adoption of and is now the official standard of both Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
ISO
ISO/R 9ISO/R 9, established 1954 and updated 1968, was the adoption of the scientific transliteration by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It covers Russian and seven additional Slavic languages.
ISO 9ISO 9:1995 is the current transliteration standard from ISO. It is based on its predecessor ISO/R 9:1968, which it deprecates; for Russian they only differ in the treatment of five modern letters. It is the first language-independent, univocal system of one character for one character equivalents (by the use of diacritics), which faithfully represents the original and allows for reverse transliteration for Cyrillic text in any contemporary language.
United Nations romanization systemThe UNGEGN, a Working Group of the United Nations, in 1987 recommended a romanization system for geographical names, which was based on GOST 16876-71. It may be found in some international cartographic products.
ALA-LC
American Library Association & Library of Congress (ALA-LC) romanization tables for Slavic alphabets (1997) are used in North American libraries.
The formal, unambiguous version of the system requires some diacritics and two-letter tie characters, which are often omitted in practice.
BGN/PCGN
The BGN/PCGN system is relatively intuitive for anglophones to read and pronounce. In many publications a simplified form of the system is used to render English versions of Russian names, typically converting ë to yo, simplifying -iy and -yy endings to -y, and omitting apostrophes for ? and ?. It can be rendered using only the basic letters and punctuation found on English-language keyboards: no diacritics or unusual letters are required, although the Interpunct character (·) can optionally be used to avoid some ambiguity.
This particular standard is part of the BGN/PCGN romanization system which was developed by the United States Board on Geographic Names and by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. The portion of the system pertaining to the Russian language was adopted by BGN in 1944, and by PCGN in 1947.
Roman alphabet
In a second sense the romanization of Russian may also indicate the introduction of a separate, independent instance of the roman alphabet for writing the Russian language. Such an alphabet is not necessarily bound closely to the traditional Cyrillic orthography. The transition from Cyrillic to Latin has been proposed several times through history, but was never conducted on a large scale except for graphemic (e.g. volapuk) and phonemic (e.g. translit) adhoc transcriptions due to technological restrictions (e.g. ASCII, SMS, IRC).
There have been more advanced, systematic proposals nevertheless, some as late as during the 1990s, when demise of the Soviet Union and technological restrictions coincided.
Some suggested to harmonize vowel glyphs within the five pairs. Based upon the common Latin vowel glyphs a, e, i, o, u, y, this would either mean putting diacritic marks (e.g. diaeresis, caron, circumflex) on the hard or the soft ones, unifying them and letting context decide which one was correct, or leaving the more common one accent-less and adopting separate diacritics or special characters for hard and soft. Alternatively y or j digraphs would be used for soft vowels, where ? would map to the other glyph.
Especially for ?, mandatory stress or non-stress marks were suggested.
| Base | Hard | Soft |
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| a | a, å | ? | ? | ä, â |
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| e | e, ? | ? | ? | ë, ê |
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| i (i) | y, i, i | ? | ? | ï/i, î |
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| o | o, ø | ? | ? | ö, ô |
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| u (y) | u, u | ? | ? | ü, û |
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| ·, ’, | | ? | ? | :, ~, - |
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The concept that is resembled by hard and soft sign is foreign to the roman alphabet, therefore some see diacritic marks (e.g. tilde) on consonant letters (e.g. ñ, l) to be the better choice.
Some roman letters, like w, q and either x or h have no modern Cyrillic equivalence and might therefore be used freely for sounds that would otherwise require diacritics or digraphs.
The following table gives consonant letters not in any traditional collation, but with voiced/voiceless pairs where possible. Most of the adaptations are straightforward and uncontroversial. The diacritic approach may be more Czech or more Turkish oriented, the digraph approach may be Polish, English, French or German oriented. As explained above, this does not give a true mapping, but approximate equivalents for many proposals.
| b | ? | ? | p |
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| v | ? | ? | f |
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| g (g, w) | ? | ? | k |
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| d | ? | ? | t |
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| z | ? | ? | s |
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| | | ? | c, t; ts |
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| | | ? | c, ç, t, t; q; ch, cz, tsh, tš, ts |
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| ž, ?, z, z; j, x; zh | ? | ? | š, s; w; sh, sz |
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| | | ? | s; w; šc, sç, šh, sh, shh, sch … |
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| j, y | ? | ? | h, x |
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| l | ? | ? | r |
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| m | ? | ? | n |
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Where ? sounds rather like /v/ or /w/, g and g have been proposed.
See also
External links- by Thomas T. Pedersen.
- into various European languages, Morse, Braille, Georgian and Arabic
- —Russian transliteration in several systems, including DIN 1460 (1982) [=ISO/R9:1968], GOST ST SEV 1362 (1978), and BSI BS 2979 (1958)
- (in Russian) — System of standards on information, librarianship and publishing. Rules of transliteration of Cyrillic script by Latin alphabet.
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