• ahnesampo
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    8 months ago

    The last name of the president of Russia is Пу́тин. Since people can’t read that without knowing Cyrillic, we need a way to map Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. However, neither Cyrillic nor Latin script have universal pronunciations: the phonetic value of letters change depending on the language. This leads to the romanization of a name being different depending what the source and target language is. Пу́тин is Putin for Russian-to-English, but Poutine for Russian-to-French. They’re both equally correct, and neither is a change from the other.

    • John_McMurray@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      I feel like this is advanced trollery, as “poutine” is a French Canadian word, not French French, and pronounced quite differently than Putin.