[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] POLISH DIACRITIC " L" EQUIVALENT IN RUSSIAN

[Otto]

QUESTION:
When a town name contains a Polish diacritic "L" how would it be  
translated
into Russian Cyrillic?

                                         Mike

Ans:
With difficulty.  The lipped 'w' sound is not produced using the  
Cyrillic alphabet.
Try substitute a Cyrillic character for English 'v', 'yu', 'u', 'y',  
or even 'L' as we do with the Polish 'L' slashed.  The scribe or  
pastor doing the recording would 'play it by ear'.

Remember, alphabets replicate vocal sounds.  They guide  
vocalization.  'Sounds like' is the rule of thumb.  'Looks like is of  
no value, especially with Cyrillic.

Most of us adapted the vocalization of our language to the Roman  
alphabet, including the Poles.  They tweak it using diacritical  
markings to to bring out proper sounds in their language. The Roman  
alphabet does not contain characters for some of their vocal  
sounds.   German with its umlauts is similar.  http:// 
www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/translit.htm  (Fraktur has passed to the  
wayside)  Our alphabets are but a close replication of our vocal  
sounds.  Old St. Cyril did a magnificent job in formulating an  
alphabet to produce exactly the sounds of the Russian tongue, giving  
the Russians a very fine instrument for writing world class  
literature and poetry. He gave Russian Orthodoxy a leg up,  
intentionally, over the Roman Catholic, Yiddish, and Turkish Islamic  
alphabets. Some of the Cyrillic characters may have a familiar look,  
but not a familiar sound connected to them, old Cyril borrowed  
characters from assorted alphabets to compose his own.


...  Otto

   " The Zen moment..." wk. of September 4, 2005-
        ________________________________
"The past, as the present...Always under construction."