Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, a great Russian writer of the nineteenth century
full-stop.net
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But precisely because of these links to absolutely wonderful resources, any curious observer from this mournful world can cheer herself up for a couple of minutes.
For example, is it possible not to laugh at such a description: "lives and sometimes writes [geographical location, not publication]. Ostensibly, ... working on a novel about a woman who inexplicably births a sheepdog".
Who would be interested in ancient literature in a world where there are such characters? LOL
Thank you.
That’s self-imposed complexity. First they transliterate it as “kh”, where “h” is enough in practice. And then these “sh”, “ch” permutations which should be something like /[ščşç]/. It could be justified if Anglophones could read it correctly, but usually I have to turn on subtitles to reconstruct a name back from that.
It's not a matter of complexity for its own sake. The standard transliteration an intentional trade-off that favors accuracy/fidelity over accessibility to lazy English speakers.
Berman has a point that a simpler system would make stuff easier to pronounce and recognize. But you'd be losing a lot of important signal and creating all kinds of other confusions (especially in dictionary entries) if you apopted that kind of a system as your standard.
For example the Х is always a "kh" sound, as in the Scottish loch, and never a "h" sound (which doesn't exist in Russian). Meanwhile if one does see a Cyrillic name transliterated with a pure "h" sound it's a good sign that it references something in Ukrainian (where the sound does occur and is quite common).
Also if we squish Щ down to "sh" then we're colliding with the representation of Ш which represents the pure "sh" sound. So you'd be creating all kinds of collisions is if you smushed these two letters down into the same representation.
While "shch" is mouthful for Anglophones - it at least tells them that something is going on, and that it's not the same as "sh" in either the Cyrillic representation or the sound.
Point being - there are reasons for the system the way it is, and it's not about pedantry really.
(BTW yes, these sounds do drift regionally and all that but that's a whole different topic).
Interestingly, you will also hear "shch" in Bulgaria.
That one caught me off guard when I saw Kherson mentioned for the first time.