>Well, guys, let's be reasonable here. The Russian alphabet does not lend itself easily to English phonetic translation. The opposite is true: My Russian friends rarely pronounce my first name correctly because there's no hard "j" sound in Russian.
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>Also, regarding pronunciation of Russian names, there's this weird (for English speakers) thing about "o"s in Russian becoming "eh"s when not the stressed syllable. So an English speaker is going to see Gorbachov and may think G-oh-rbach-oh-ff when the ending "o" is actually pronounced as an "eh".
Actually it's the other way around... but yeh, it's a tough one. Even coming from a phonetic cyrillic alphabet I had trouble memorizing that in my Russian class - we used to write that umlaut in 5-8 grade or so, then went all the way and stopped writing it altogether just like they do it in proper Russian. We considered it a sneaky thing to do, when everything else was pretty simple and almost phonetic (except they write ??? but pronounce ??? like we do, and the words ending in -??? and such are actually pronounced with -???, but at least there's not much of that). But this ye being pronounced like yo... sometimes, now that was a tough one.
>As to umlauts, I don't recall any umlauts in Cyrillic. There's this weird dippy line sometimes but that's not an umlaut, an umlaut is two dots over a vowel to denote a change in pronunciation. Umlauts are German, I thought. Maybe my memory is faulty.
It should be there, theoretically. Nobody writes it. It's pretty much dead as an idea... follow Nick's link, you'll see its tombstone :).
>Also, the (I suck at phonetic spelling of Russian words so be forewarned) "myachyi snyak" and "tvordyi snyak" ... the soft sign and hard sign have no English equivalencies. An English speaker wouldn't know to put the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth to properly pronounce, say, "nachalnik" (boss).
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>English speakers with no Russian training just don't know that "zh", "ch", "tch", "ts" are single letters. And that the letter G is only a G when it's not an R. There are 33 letters; we're only used to 26!
You should settle with Serbian then, only 30, actually 60 - we can use Cyrillic and/or Latin. You'd be Džon Koziol / ??? ??????. Latin isn't exactly perfect, we have three pairs (dž - dzh - your J, lj - as in tortilla, famiglia, and nj as in new - they'd be single letters in Cyrillic: ?, ?, ?).
>SET HUMOR ON (I need to do that lately): Of course, being an ignorant American from an ignorant country may obviate all of these observations.
??? ????... ooops... the other night a guy at the cash register behind us, in the grocery, talks into his cell phone a tad louder. Pronounces his English quite nicely, but too clear... not a Southerner... and then he says "I am shopping"... ah, a Belgrader. Must be. Anyone local here would say "I'm gettingrosheries" or "Imatta groshery store"... anything that has fruit and vegetables doesn't count as shopping. And sure enough, we saw a few others outside walking, with white plastic bags in their hands. Saw them at the same place last year. End of tourist season, the kids are getting off a bit earlier in the evening, just in time to buy something to eat (this guy had bought a large steak, didn't really look at the rest).
BTW, another sure sign to recognize an ex-Yugo: in November, you'll see him buying a dozen cabbages, or a cartfull. You're not a proper household if you don't do your own sour cabbage of whole heads, not just the chopped thing, and just salt, water and skill, no other ingredients. OK, a few laurels, but that's it. And a large stone on top, to keep the cabbage immersed. Which is why they never tried to fix any cobblestone streets in November back home - if they removed a few stones in the afternoon, half of the street would be without a single stone by the morning.
