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Comment by DrSAR | Hacker News Reader

That t is not entirely useless (non-native Russian speaker here). Even the pronunciation of 'check' has a starting t sound in it: tʃɛk. Without the starting t, you might end up with something that could be spelled sheck in English.

So I'd argue, that the t in transliterations helps people who don't speak Russian to get the ч sound right. Since the transliteration as 'ch' is ambiguous and doesn't appear to work for many of the inhabitants of Vancouver, WA. So ideally we should all use IPA or better yet, ask a Russian speaker.

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> Without the starting t, you might end up with something that could be spelled sheck in English.

That might be true.

The truer thing though is, English speakers at least (unless they're a linguist or read IPA in the morning), go ahead and pronounce (or try to) the t and run into trouble every time because t-ch-kalof is a challenge they're not up to (Russians won't have a problem with it, even when drunk).

(Native Russian speaker here) I don’t really agree. The “t” and “ch” require very different tongue and jaw positions and combining them is awkward and would require a vowel in between when used in a real word.

English speakers are perfectly capable of pronouncing ch vs sh (e.g. chair vs share) whereas sh vs sh’ (ш/щ) might be more challenging.

The IPA of chair also contains a t though:

/t͡ʃɛə(ɹ)/

I think it makes sense. To me there is a clear difference between chair and sheet, where chair starts with the sound of a t. Same thing with Ч.

That (the IPA designations) could, and probably is, helpful for breaking down sounds on paper but taking that /t/ from what is a manual of sorts and dropping it into a foreign transliteration is the opposite of helpful.

Everybody expect the French won't have any problem reading out without stumbling Chkalov or Chmil. Supplying the /t/ is a copout to please the French and, as a bonus, to piss of the Russians (especially the Chekalovs ones).

A more perfect construct would piss off the French and Russians simultaneously.

Also a native speaker, and fully agreed with you.

Especially since there exist words in russian language that actually have "т" before "ч", and the sound it makes is different. Compare "отчёт" and "очки" (the closest similar word i could think of by the sound of the first half of it). If you try pronouncing the first word as if "т" wasn't there (or the second word, but as it "т" was there), it will sound both very different and wrong.

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