Sino-Russian Transcription and Transliteration
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It has often been my duty to translate or edit Russian archeological and Sinological works in English. Two things plague such work more than anything else, and both have to do with transliteration.
First of all, unlike pinyin for Chinese, there is no governmentally sanctioned, officially recognized, widely accepted system of romanization for Russian Cyrillic script. Many people do use the Library of Congress system, but more by default than by choice.
More of a headache than the lack of an official romanization for Russian itself, however, are the idiosyncrasies of the Russian Cyrill(ic)ization of Mandarin. Although it apparently works well enough for Russian Sinologists who grow up with it and receive their training exclusively through this system, Russian Cyrill(ic)ization constitutes a bit of a nightmare for those who are not accustomed to its special features. Here I shall give just a few examples of how different Cyrill(ic)ization of Mandarin is from pinyin Romanization:
| Russian Cyrill(ic)ization | Pinyin | Wade-Giles | IPA |
| -нь vs. -н (pre-revolutionary -нь vs. -НЪ ) |
-n vs. -ng | -n vs. -ng | -[n] vs. -[ŋ] |
| г- vs. х- | g- vs. h- | k- vs. h- | [k]- vs. [x]- |
| Б* vs. П | b- vs. p- | p- vs. p' | [p]- vs. [pʰ]- |
| чи vs. ци | chi vs. qi | ch'ih vs. ch'i | [ʈʂʰz̩] or [ʈʂʰʐ̩] vs. [tɕʰi] |
| ши vs. си | shi vs. xi | shih vs. hsi | [ʂz̩] or [ʂʐ̩] vs. [ɕi] |
(IPA specialists may have some suggestions for improvement. Note that Wade-Giles is closer to IPA than either pinyin or Cyrill[ic]ized Mandarin.)
Trying to navigate between Cyrill(ic)ized Mandarin and pinyin or other Romanization so that one can figure out what the original characters were is often enormously perplexing. The challenges are even greater when one is striving to recover, for example, an original Uyghur or other non-Sinitic name that was transcribed into Chinese characters and then transcribed from characters into Cyrillic.
Attempting to go backward in that chain of transcriptions — Cyrill(ic)ized Chinese → Chinese characters → Uyghur has caused me much hair-whitening grief. Here are a couple of typical examples, with the Russian hovering somewhere between a transcription from Chinese and a transliteration from Uyghur:
| Romanization of Cyrillized Chinese |
Pinyin | Hanzi | Uyghur |
| Kermutsi | Ke'ermuqi | 克爾木齊 | Keremchi |
| Agershen | Aga'ersen | 啊尕爾森 | Agharsin |
(A tip of the hat to Rostislav Berezkin for help with the Cyrillic; also to Zev Handel, David Branner, and Mark Swofford for assistance with the IPA.)
Robert F said,
September 17, 2008 @ 9:52 am
Which romanization is it that uses l' for a palatalized l sound? I see that used often for surnames.
teucer said,
September 17, 2008 @ 11:09 am
Wait, if си is used for Pinyin xi, how do they write the sound of Pinyin "si"?
Jean-Sébastien Girard said,
September 17, 2008 @ 12:03 pm
@Teucer – Apparently (with usual caveats re: Wikipedia), "сы".
Rawley Grau said,
September 17, 2008 @ 12:42 pm
@Robert F – Virtually all romanizations of Russian use l' for palatalized l when it comes at the end of a word or before a consonant or an iotized vowel (e.g. Gogol', L'vov, Yel'tsin or Jel'cin or Iel'tsin or El'tsin, and bez bel'ya ["without underwear"]); in all these cases this represents the Cyrillic spelling ль (l + "soft sign"): Гоголь, Львов, Ельцин, без белья. But very often in non-specialist texts the apostrophe or acute accent mark is dropped, especially in proper names, to make the transliteration more "reader-friendly"; hence we get Gogol, Yeltsin, and Lvov.
Neil Dolinger said,
September 17, 2008 @ 6:58 pm
Would Pinyin 'ci' be represented as 'цы'? And how does Cyrillic romanization deal with Pinyin 'cu' and 'qu' if the same letter 'ц' is used for both 'c' and 'q'? I guess I could look at the Wikipedia article that JSG suggested. I can see why this stuff is so crazy-making for Victor.
Jean-Sébastien Girard said,
September 17, 2008 @ 10:38 pm
According to said article, Russian splits and
Jean-Sébastien Girard said,
September 17, 2008 @ 10:38 pm
*headdesk*
Mental note: Angle brackets to indicate spelling? Bad idea.
John Cowan said,
September 18, 2008 @ 12:10 am
Jean-Sébastien Girard:
Actually, all alphabetic representations of Mandarin I know of except Hanyu Pinyin use the same basic scheme: the the alveolopalatals j, q, x are unified with either the palatals z, c, s or the retroflexes zh, ch, sh. The only time further disambiguation is required is when the rhyme is i. Wade-Giles, for example, uses ch'i, chi, hsi for the alveopalatals and ch'ih, chih, shih for the retroflexes (note that hs redundantly indicates Pinyin x).
If you want angle brackets < and >, write < and > respectively.
Jean-Sébastien Girard said,
September 18, 2008 @ 12:22 pm
I honestly have no familiarity with the transcription systems for Chinese. I was just indicating what the page I'd originally pointed to gave for those syllables.
I know how to get angle brackets. I just did not expect them to disappear around a "c", and had forgotten that <q> was a legitimate HTML tag (the short form of <quote>, for the r4ecord, which is not recognized by IE).
darts said,
September 19, 2008 @ 9:20 am
My question has always been, is it really true, as wikipedia claims, that they changed the cyrillization of 会 to хой or хуэй (and thus making the whole system inconsistent) in order to avoid 社会主义 becoming unintentionally obscene?
Neil Dolinger said,
September 20, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
Although I don't like how this system uses Cyrillic 'ц' for both Pinyin 'c' and 'q', I do like the addition of the 'й' at the end of syllables to indicate near-close near-front rounded vowels. If you aren't going to use IPA, it's a neat way to call attention to that phantom 'i' sound heard at the tail end of these syllables.
@Darts, what is the obscenity they might be trying to avoid? I took two years of Russian in high school, not enough time to learn all the useful words!
Aaron Davies said,
September 20, 2008 @ 12:13 pm
wait, wade-giles is closer to IPA? i always thought one of the main design goals of pinyin was to bring the transcription closer to standards like IPA.
David Marjanović said,
September 20, 2008 @ 1:50 pm
Actually, it is surprisingly close to Pinyin, more so than Wade-Giles: it uses the same letter for [i] and [ɨ] (thus distinguishing ji and zhi in the consonant rather than the vowel), it uses the letters for voiced vs voiceless plosives and affricates to transcribe unaspirated vs aspirated ones — you provide two examples –, and it marks the tones in the same way (in the cringeworthily few cases when the tones are indicated at all). What looks idiosyncratic about it turns out to be pretty much inevitable if you know the Russian language. For example, the use of -нь vs. -н, in Russian [nʲ] vs [n], makes sense because there is no [ŋ] in Russian; нг would get pronounced [ng] — not [ŋg], mind you; [ng]! –, and that would be well nigh incomprehensible. That си is used for xi makes sense because [sʲi] sounds almost the same as how xi is pronounced in proper Putonghua (true [ɕi] is, in my limited experience, only produced by southerners who don't retroflex). The same (minus voice and aspiration) holds for дзи and ци for ji and qi.
IMHO, you exaggerate the amount of friction in the vowel of shi zhi chi ri; just writing it as [ɯ] or (a bit more accurately) [ɨ] would be less confusing.
Debatable. Wade-Giles puts a lot of unnecessary emphasis on the fact that the plosives and affricates are all voiceless, and marks the really important (and very loud) aspiration only by an apostrophe that tends to get dropped. Pinyin may incorrectly suggest that the lenes are voiced, but it gets across that they are lenes (as the voiceless plosives of Spanish as well as word-initial "voiced" plosives in spoken, as opposed to sung, English are, or what many Americans do to the unaspirated /k/ in skill and school) and not fortes (as the voiceless plosives of French, Russian or Japanese are, and as English word-final voiceless plosives are).
Correct — ы being the Russian letter for [ɨ], which is very similar to the Chinese [ɯ].
Correct.
Incidentally, Pinyin cui is цуй. Pinyin cuyi (two syllables) is цуи. That, too, makes plenty of sense when you know Russian (specifically Russian, not, say, Serbian).
I don't know if that was made official or something, but it was sometimes done, the Russian word хуй (identical to Polish chuj) being a very popular swearword meaning "penis".
It doesn't, really. It uses ц for c and ць for q. Minus the aspiration, this gets the pronunciation practically right! It just so happens that, in the Russian orthography, ь is always fused into the following vowel, turning а э ы о у into я е и ё ю — and in Chinese there is always a following vowel.
I don't hear any such thing. I suspect it isn't there, and you just interpret [y] that way because there's no [y] in English.
Oh no. The main goal was to use it to teach the whole country the most prescriptive pronunciation of Putonghua. That's why Pinyin marks several contrasts that are not phonemic, most dramatically that between bo, po, mo, fo and luo, nuo, cuo, guo…, but also that between j q x on the one hand and z c s, zh ch sh, or k g h on the other.
David Marjanović said,
September 20, 2008 @ 1:53 pm
David Marjanović said,
September 20, 2008 @ 1:59 pm
Oops, forgot to close the blockquote between the last two paragraphs.
Incidentally, the sound used for x and as part of q and j in the most prescriptive Putonghua accent doesn't have an IPA symbol. It's somewhere between [sʲ], [ɕ] and [ç]. I think it's the dorso-palatal sibilant.
And I misremembered the transcription of ji: it's not дзи, which would too strongly imply complete voicing, but цзи.
Complete list of Mandarin syllables in Pinyin and Russian transcription
Neil Dolinger said,
September 20, 2008 @ 6:31 pm
"If you aren't going to use IPA, it's a neat way to call attention to that phantom 'i' sound heard at the tail end of these syllables."
"I don't hear any such thing. I suspect it isn't there, and you just interpret [y] that way because there's no [y] in English."
I'll admit that I don't really hear that 'й' when the syllable is part of a longer word (e.g., 'qunian'), but in isolation (e.g., qu, xu, nü, lü, etc.) I do hear it. I think it comes when the speaker is relaxing their lips while still voicing the vowel, unrounding the rounded vowel as it were.
Yuriy Zhilovets said,
September 15, 2009 @ 1:37 am
Really, there's a one-to-one mapping between Russian (Palladian system) and pinyin. No exceptions. So, all is needed is just to memorize it.
English from Russian and Chinese – yikes! | The Cranky Professor said,
March 3, 2012 @ 10:48 am
[…] under "problems I'm really glad not to have" – transliterating Russian transliterations of Chinese. It has often been my duty to translate or edit Russian archeological and Sinological works in […]