Re: Support for Latin ligature IJ (was another thread)

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2016 16:57:01 +0200

2016-03-31 7:51 GMT+02:00 Martin J. Dürst <duerst_at_it.aoyama.ac.jp>:

>
> I'm not an expert in French or Dutch pronunciation or orthography, but as
> far as I understand, transforming "L’Haÿ-les-Roses" to "L’Haij-les-Roses"
> would be wrong because it would lead to a wrong pronunciation; if anything,
> "L’Hij-les-Roses" would be closer.

No. The actual pronunciation would be closer to "L'a-i-lè-Roz'" (note the
"H" is mute just like the final "es").

In Russian Wikipedia, it is currently transliterated to Cyrillic by
ignoring the diaresis which is fundamental (as if it was written "Hay" or
"Haie" in French), i.e. "aÿ" represented as a single Cyrillic vowel (French
pronounces the two vowels "a" and "y" distinctly because of the diaeresis,
this is the standard role of the diaeresis in French to separate letters,
without even any diphtong, or just a very light diphtong between them in
fast speech which still preserves the two vowels). Obviously the Russian
transliteration is definitely wrong (but it has been borrowed automatically
from Russian Wikipedia to OpenStreetMap). I don't think there's any
attested usage in Russian with this faulty pronunciation, except when
Russians will read the Russian Wikipedia writing this bad name in Cyrillic.

Note that Russian Wikipedia is full of very strange (faulty or incoherent)
translitterations of foreign terms, invented by some self-proclaimed
"experts" (sometimes they mix an actual translation, sometimes they use
transliteration. E.g. with the clealt faulty transliteration of
"Seine-Saint-Denis" which transliterates the two first words (clearly
distinct phonetically in French) with the same 3 Cyrillic letters, with
strange approcimation of the actual phonetics, but not with the actual
Russian translations of "Seine" and "Saint" : on compound names based on
them, sometimes the Russian translation on Wikipedia is used, sometimes the
transliteration without any consistence, this choice is completely
arbitrary).
Received on Thu Mar 31 2016 - 09:58:18 CDT

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