SEEJ Transliteration Preference

[Udut, Kenneth]

Oh, this isn't for any scholarly usage :)

Just for my own practice in reading Cyrillic characters.

By doing this, I'm eliminating the need to translate
the words themselves, since they are already familiary
to me, as they are in English.  Yet, it forces me to
realize that Cyrillic is not as painful as it at
first appears.

It is odd, though, that the 'ooih' sound
(?) gives me no trouble in listening, but
I always seem to struggle when I come
across it in reading, and try to pronounce it.

It was presented, in one of the first books
I looked at for learning Russian, as a potential
'problem' for English speakers to get right,
and unfortunately, this has stuck with me.  It's
getting easier, though, as I listen to more
Russian on tapes, and try to speak-along with
the speaker, while reading the text.  It's
helping me to see words as blocks, instead of
a group of individual letters.

           Kenneth Udut
Kenneth.Udut at SPCORP.COM

|-----Original Message-----
|From: Yoshimasa Tsuji [mailto:yamato at yt.cache.waseda.ac.jp]
|Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 1999 10:26 AM
|To: SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
|Subject: Re: SEEJ Transliteration Preference
|
|
|Hello Udut,
|I don't think there is any intuitive transliteration of Roman Q
|into Cyrillic. You might dare to assign it to Russian Ja, but
|you cannot
|be serious in doing so.
|  Russians import English words, respecting, perhaps in the Russian
|mind, the original pronunciation. That is the established way.
|(A friend of mine once corrected me to the effect that "paati",
|not "partija" was the friendly gathering).
|
|  Roman alphabet has a very useful character H which stands for
|an alternative sound of the preceding consonant or the succeeding
|vowel. It is a valuable addition to the Western Greek alphabet.
|Cyrillic lacks that kind of versatile, all-purpose, emergency-help
|character.
|
|Cheers,
|Tsuji
|
|-------
|P.S.
|Russian and Soviet linguists up to 1930's used Roman
|alphabets for minority languages that had so far no writing systems,
|exceptions were some Arabic writing systems in Islamic minorities, but
|not in Cyrillic. It is time for them to go back to "scholarly"
|notations.
|