Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 May 14

= May 14 =

H, Х, and Г
When faced with a name beginning with "H" how do Russian-speakers know how to transliterate it? The Soviet Union issued a stamp depicting О. Генри (O. Henry), and the Russian Wikipedia has an article on Натаниэль Готорн (Nathaniel Hawthorne), but the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed by Джон Хэнкок, and the North American baseball hitter is named Хэнк Аарон. 2001:18E8:2:28CA:F000:0:0:CB89 (talk) 13:52, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Previous ref-desk threads here and here. It looks as though the Г spelling is more old-fashioned, so it tends to appear in names whose transliterations were established some time ago rather than in ones transliterated more recently. Deor (talk) 14:28, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, Harry Hopkins became "Garry Gopkins" in the Russian of the 1940s, but he would more likely be "Kharry Khopkins" today... AnonMoos (talk) 15:13, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Many years ago I saw a Russian film version of Shakespeare's famous play Gamlet. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 21:04, 14 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Г fairly uniformly represents hard gee in the remainder of the slavic languages. In the Eastern Slavic languages it represents an /h/ in the southern dialects of Ukranian and Rusyn, where a new Ґ symbol was created to cover hard gee.  In the Belorussian language. (where it is rare) it is usually pronounced /ɣ/, and more rarely /g/, in which case the non-standard Ґ is sometimes used.  In middle and northern Russian dialects it is a hard gee, with the aitch sound being perceived as 'southern'.  Given these languages were all considered dialects (Great, Small, and White) of one Russian language until the 1800's, using a variant /h/ of a sound that was probably /ɣ/ to cover h would seem natural.  Now that the southern dialects that have this feature are "foreign" languages, it would not be surprising for po-Moskowsky speaking Russians to drop the now unmotivated use of Г and switch to Х. μηδείς (talk) 17:35, 14 May 2014 (UTC)  Paging User:Любослов Езыкин.
 * Before Peter I all Latinate words was coming through of Polish or rather the Ukrainian-Belarusian macro-language (which might be called "Old Ruthenian"). Also it is worth to mention that in the Russian dialect of Church Slavonic Г was pronounced like /ɣ~ɦ/. In Southern Russian Г is also /ɣ/. Hence everything favoured rendering Latin H as Cyrillic Г. This tradition continued into the 18th and 19th centuries. But since 20th, when Г=/g/ became the only accepted variant of the standard pronunciation, the old transliteration became too different from the Latin original. Hence the names which have come to Russian after that time are rendered with H=Х. But nevertheless this things are not so straightforward and many exceptions may occur.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:40, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * So, we agree. μηδείς (talk) 04:40, 15 May 2014 (UTC)
 * As noted in the Harpo Marx article, when he was in the USSR on a diplomatic tour, the Soviet press referred to him as XАРПО МAРКС. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:31, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Whoever typed this used a Roman X and, for the family name only, a Roman A, which, though identical in shape, are semantically different Unicode characters from Cyrillic Х and А. I fixed it in the article. --Theurgist (talk) 09:17, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I used to get Russian spam in which some of the letters acemnopux substituted for the Cyrillic letters they resemble, to make life difficult for filters that look for keywords. (If they're still doing that, Pobox's filter has improved.) —Tamfang (talk) 05:20, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm just going to quote what Angr once wrote at this reference desk: "I once heard that there are Russians who have heard of both the outspoken American political dissident Ноам Хомский and the American linguist Ноэм Чомски but don't realize that the two are the same person; I can't verify that that's true though." — Kpalion(talk) 22:52, 15 May 2014 (UTC)


 * However, those are an original Slavic (starting with [x]) and an Americanized (starting with [tʃ]) version of a particular name. The Г can transcribe [h], [ɦ], [ɣ] and, of course, [ɡ]. The [x] (spelled as "ch" in many languages) uniformly gets a Russian Х. --Theurgist (talk) 15:52, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Hm, I'd have guessed the other way around. —Tamfang (talk) 05:20, 1 April 2023 (UTC)