>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.
>
>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".
>
>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.
>

There is e with two dots which is pronounced as jo (yo). However, it's rarely used in books, usually it's obvious by the context.

It's much harder in Hebrew if there are no nikudots. The word is understood from the context and for people knowing the language it's not a problem, but for me it's almost impossible to read without them.

The other letter is j (e short). It has a tilda on top which is also not often shown in written text, if I remeber correctly.

>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).
>
>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!
>
>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.
>
>>>>Choosing which intelligence to accept or ignore, especially when the information is limited, is always a problem. In this case the administration had adopted the 1% thresh hold - i.e. if there was *any* chance of a threat, react as if the threat was certain, the idea being if you are going to be wrong, it is better to be wrong one way than another.
>>>>
>>>>But I completely agree that extensive intelligence is the best way to prevent conflict and other nasty surprises.
>>>
>>>Just like Hrushchov (*) said to JFK: "Wouldn't it be cheaper if we told each other everything? I'm paying my agents and your agents, you're paying your agents and my agents... while we could just cut out the middlemen." (offhead quote).
>>>
>>>----
>>>(*) I can take a lot of mispronunciation, even with my last name... but this case is becoming ridiculous. Just the other day I heard Joe Biden pronounce it as "kroos-chev". First, it's not a kay, it's an aitch. When the Russian official spelling has a kh, it's h as in "his", never a kay. They have a k for that. Second, it's not borsht, it's borshch - sh, ch, as in "newschannel" (yep, they pronounce it as noosh channel). Last, forgivable, is that the accented e like that is pronounced like yo - o would be good. So Hruschchov, Gorbachov, despite the spelling. Russian grammar says there should be an umlaut on the e in such cases, but nobody does it. It's there only while you learn the language; in real life you just won't see it.
>>
>>Here is one "?" for you. :-) ( no, it's not question mark - it's the russian letter 'e' in cyrillic encoding)
>>
>>http://www.ruschudo.ru/miracles/287.html