[mova] Harper or KHarper ?!
K&I Bell
kib at magma.ca
Fri Feb 3 18:07:09 EST 2006
Hello Mova Folks -
I hope H vs KH can be nipped in the bud ! I have already seen
Canadian prime-minister-elect Stephen Harper's name written in Ukrainian as
KHarper instead of Harper ! ('X' - sorry, I don't have cyrillic script in
my e-mail)
The actual pronunciation of the English 'H', and Harper's name, is
much, much, closer to the Ukr 'H' than to 'KH'. So why not use it - in
Ukrainian, H in Harper should be used rather than KHarper.
In Russian, there is no 'H', and there the 'KH' sound is probably
closest. But Ukrainian has an H. In Ukraine it now seems to be accepted
that transcription and transliteration should go directly between two
languages and not through a third language (in this case, Russian), as had
unfortunately been done in the years of the Soviet Union. Going from
English through Russian to Ukrainian created the unintelligible 'KHello'
pronunciation instead of Hello, Khokei instead of Hoki, and 'KHow are
you', instead of 'How are you'.
Thankfully, correct Ukrainian to English transliteration has had
more prominence lately, and so presumably we will no longer have references
to Gnatishin instead of Hnatyshyn, and official Ukrainian gov't
correspondence with 'vul. Grushevskogo' on letterheads.
But the English-to-Ukrainian KH vs H problem is very irritating,
and the Harper case may be the opportunity to bring attention to correcting
this.
Irena Bell , Ottawa
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