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Comment by mafuyu | Hacker News Reader

The creator, Alexey Pajitnov, was eventually able to see some money from his creation after emigrating to the US and cofounding The Tetris Company. The Gaming Historian channel has a great documentary video on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8

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Kind of a tangent, but it'd weird to me that this man chooses to transcribe ж as j in his surname. Typically ж would be zh, and I think of j as a palatal consonant.

I had to look up the Cyrillic spelling of his name to be sure I wasn't misunderstanding.

I guess some English speakers would be more comfortable with J for that sound.

Takes a special kind of person to correct another on the pronunciation of their own name.

The pronunciation is not something I'm disputing. I'm talking about romanization of the Cyrillic alphabet. There are a few established standards, ж is typically zh or ž, and j has common use as a different sound.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian

In that table, literally none of the standards cited use j for ж. J is often used for й, or part of я, ю, ё.

The same article says:

In Soviet international passports, transliteration was based on French rules but without diacritics and so all names were transliterated in a French-style system.

"French-style system" links to this article in French: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_du_russe_en_fr..., which transliterates ж to j.

It is confusing that this mapping is missing from the table in the English article.

He might not have had a choice in the matter - the passport issued by the Soviet / Russian authorities had the spelling chosen by the authority, not by the person.

It’s possible to change your spelling in the US documents but now different documents have different spelling.

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