268 National Geographic Magazine. 
and Germans have already done, will report rules, that may 
become generally satisfactory to American geographers. 
In our own country the territory of Alaska needs special atten- 
tion in regard to settling the orthography of its geographic 
names of Russian origin. Russian names have always been more 
or less of a bugbear in geographic literature, since so great a 
number of them appear in different forms. The difficulties of 
transcribing Russian names so as to reproduce the correct pro- 
nunciation are well enough understood. In the first place the 
Russian alphabet contains 36 letters, of which 12 are vowels and 
diphthongs, 3 are semi-vowels, and the balance, consonants. In 
this alphabet, there are 12 elements which have no exact equiva= 
lents in the English alphabet, and, on the other hand, there are 4 
' English sounds (7, w, «and h) not represented in the Russian 
alphabet. Hence, whatever system is employed, we can only hope 
to give the pronunciation approximately. Many of the Russian 
names found to-day in English and American maps and publica- 
tions show, by the way in which they are rendered, an utter. 
absence of knowledge of the grammatical construction of Russian 
on the part of those who originally transcribed them. There are 
few other languages in which case and gender play such an 
important part in the terminal inflections of proper names as in 
this great Slavonic idiom. Any one not conversant with the 
Russian declensions should not, therefore, attempt to transcribe 
Russian geographic names into English, as he will be sure to 
blunder. On Russian maps, for instance ; Behring Strait reads, — 
“ Beringov Proliv ;” Behring Sea, “ Beringovo More ;” Kam- 
chatka Bay, “ Zaliv Kamchatkiu;” Herald Island, “ Ostrova Ghe- 
ralda;” ete. 
By the by, I cannot exactly understand why the spelling of the 
name of Behring should, within the last few years, have been 
changed on American and English maps to Bering. ‘The navi- 
gator of this name, Veit Behring, was a native of Germany, in 
the service of Russia, and it is safe to say that his name con- 
tained the letter 4. Naturally, in transcribing his name into 
Russian, the 4 had to drop out, as that letter is missing in the 
Russian alphabet. 
The excellent system of transcribing Russian names into Eng- 
lish, published in a recent number of Watwre,* having already 
been accepted by English and American representatives of various 
scientific institutions, it is greatly to be desired that English and 
* February 27, 1890. | 
