26 



EEPORT OF THE UNITED STATES GEOGRAPHIC BOARD. 



No. 26 is almost unanimously ren- 

 dered by sh; two deviations, sch and 

 ch, are subject to the same remarks as 

 No. 25. 



No. 27 is obviously a combination of 

 Nos. 25 and 26, and the weight of au- 

 thority is for shch, the sound being as 

 in parish church. Two deviations, 

 schtsch and chtch, respectively Ger- 

 man and French, naturally follow the 

 rules adopted in those countries for 

 Nos. 25 and 26. 



Nos. 28 and 30 are mute and often 

 ignored in transliteration. The Li- 

 brary of Congress, however, does not 

 sanction the omission, and in this 

 seems clearly right for two reasons. 

 First, if they are not represented in 

 a transliteration, a retransliteration 

 would be incomplete. Secondly, they 

 have an actual function which is 

 stated by the Russian embassy to be 

 this — being generally placed at the end 

 of a word (or sylable) No. 28 makes 

 the sound hard and No. 30 makes the 

 sound soft. The latter serves to pal- 

 atalize the preceding consonant; fol- 

 lowing No. 15, which has the .simple 

 sound n, it forms with it gn or gne, 

 which are to be pronounced as the 

 French gn in mignon, or the Italian 

 gn in ogni. It seems clear, therefore, 

 that there should be characters as- 

 signed to them for transliteration ; and 

 the single and double apostrophes 

 adopted by the Library of Congress 

 seem suitable under every considera- 

 tion. These must, of course, be made 

 carefully distinct from quotation 

 marks or inverted commas. 



No. 29 is variously interpreted as i 

 and y, witli and without diacritics; it 

 is, however, a vowel (which eliminates 

 y), having the sound of i in bill and 

 pit, pronounced deep down in the 

 throat and with closed teeth. An oc- 

 casional sound is ui or we, concei-ning 

 which Hugo's Russian grammar says: 

 " Most books give the sound as we or 

 oo-e short, but this is hardly correct." 

 Bondar's method, however, considers 

 it regular. In imitative pronunciation 

 it is not easily distinguished from No. 

 9 (i) ; but in written representation 



it must be distinguished from it in 

 some way, and the choice seems to lie 

 between the use of a diacritic and the 

 frank adoption of some digraph which 

 may be open to the objection of not 

 correctly representing the most usual 

 sound of the Russian character. Such 

 a digraph is ui ; and that seems to be 

 the least objectionable solution. 



Nos. 31, 33, and 34 form a group 

 governed by a common principle in 

 the representation of their sounds. 

 The sounds are those that are pro- 

 duced, respectively, by ye, yu, and ya, 

 or ie, iu, and la. In certain racial 

 areas they are expi-essed by je, ju, and 

 ja, in accordance with the linguistic 

 rules of those areas ; but j has an en- 

 tirely different value as used by the 

 Geographic Board and is not at all 

 applicable. Of the two forms, ye and 

 ie, the former is in more perfect ac- 

 cord with the rule of the Geographic 

 Board to employ y always as a con- 

 sonant, as in it the stress is more natu- 

 rally laid upon the constituents e and 

 u and a, wliile in ie and in and ia it 

 could often be placed upon the first 

 vowel, which only imparts the dis- 

 tinctive character to the constituents. 

 Also a transcription ie, iu, and ia 

 would require that the two vowels in 

 each be joined by a diacritic mark, as 

 in the Library of Congress card, to 

 indicate that they are to be pronounced 

 with one emission of the voice and are 

 not intended to represent separate 

 Russian characters. Ye, yu, and ya 

 are therefore recommended for Nos. 

 31, 33, 34. 



No. 32 is quite generally given as e, 

 distinguished in the Library of Con- 

 gress table by a diacritic mark, being 

 otherwise identical with No. 6. The 

 shades of pronunciation given to it 

 vary between e as in enemy (like No. 

 6) and a as in fate. Whichever be the 

 more exact, or the more frequent, the 

 necessity exists of distinguishing it 

 from No. 6 in transliteration ; and, as 

 the stock of diagraphs is exhausted, 

 there seems to be no escape from the 

 alternative of making this one excep- 

 tion to the rule of avoiding the use of 



