Comment by untech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by untech | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Internationalisation is hard, like for Пётр Ильич Чайковский (Tchaikovsky) and his 31 different names on MusicBrainz.

https://dustri.org/b/horrible-edge-cases-to-consider-when-de...

Also from Wikipedia:

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (note: Often anglicized as Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky; also standardized by the Library of Congress. His names are also transliterated as Piotr or Petr; Ilitsch or Il'ich; and Tschaikowski, Tschaikowsky, Chajkovskij, or Chaikovsky. He used to sign his name/was known as P. Tschaïkowsky/Pierre Tschaïkowsky in French (as in his afore-reproduced signature), and Peter Tschaikowsky in German, spellings also displayed on several of his scores' title pages in their first printed editions alongside or in place of his native name. The modern transliterations of Russian produce the following results for 'Пётр Ильич Чайковский' — ISO 9: Pëtr Ilʹič Čajkovskij, ALA-LC: Pëtr Ilʹich Chaĭkovskiĭ, BGN/PCGN: Pëtr Il'ich Chaykovskiy.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ilyich_Tchaikovsky

It is far worse for historical names, I agree.

I’m told today the transliterations are standardised enough that it doesn’t happen much. Greek and Russian friends describe less mangling of their names than I get.

Well, my Cyrillic full name has only two realistic transliterations, but I have friends who have it much worse. Especially people who has a Cyrillic Ë somewhere in their name, because it could be spelled without the diacritic in Cyrillic itself, leading to different transliterations.

Luckily I live in Armenia now, which not only has its own alphabet, but also has a tradition of armenising Slavic patronyms! (Which is fair, I guess, as Armenian patronyms are commonly russified in Slavic countries.)

Anyway, the transliteration of Cyrillic at least is not really standardised in my experience. It used to be worse, with Polish, French and English styles, now it settled on English, but there are a still several sticking points which cause combinatoric explosion of variants. Not to mention that my perspective is centered on Russian, and there is a different standard of transliteration for Ukrainian at least (Kyiv and Kiev are Levenshtein 2 apart in Latin, but Levenshtein 1 apart in Cyrillic), and there is a ton of other Cyrillic languages.

My perspective is on the experience of an immigrant in an English-speaking country. Greek and Russian friends give their standardised Latin-for-English transliterations everywhere and it works because there's no diacritics and no English speakers bother trying to read the Greek or Cyrillic versions. My own Romanian name being Latin alphabet with diacritics seems to get mangled in more ways, from what we've compared.

Yeah, look at Zelensky / Zelenskyy / Zelenskyi / Zelenskiy, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy

He's also Volodymyr / Vladimir, and it's like with Kyiv: the Levenshtein difference is increased by transliteration.

Also, I discovered that Levenshtein himself was from USSR, and that's why he's not Levenstein. Though I would not be surprised if some of his relatives would prefer Levenstein, just like Ekaterina (or Yekaterina?) Schulmann [1] doesn't like to be spelled as Shulman.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekaterina_Schulmann

Reply on news.ycombinator.com