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I am not referring to IPA. I am referring to examples in textbooks. For example, my Ukrainian textbook says that the letter Я is pronounced as "ja". Most native English speakers would pronounced this as it sounds in "jar", whereas the true pronunciation is closer to "ya" in my experience. This is a case where English speakers are explicitly the target audience.

This answer says that J has always had the same sound, so it can't be because of a change in sound overtime after the establishment of a convention.

Community
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rootmeanclaire
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  • @suməlic I've seen it in cases where English speakers are the target audience; question has been edited. – rootmeanclaire Nov 06 '16 at 20:25
  • Even when English speakers are the main target audience of a romanization, that doesn't require that the romanization system be based solely on English. IPA isn't, and it's commonly used in resources for English speakers. Decisions like this will probably depend a lot on the language. For example, maybe the author of the Ukrainian textbook wanted to use "y" to represent a Ukrainian vowel, so that prevented them from using it for this consonant sound. – herisson Nov 06 '16 at 20:30
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    The Russian letters Ё, Ю, and Я are commonly spelled "Yo", "Yu" and "Ya" when representing Russian initials in bibliographies of scientific publications. So "Ja" is not completely standard. – Peter Shor Nov 06 '16 at 20:59
  • Usually, in any decent textbook that deals with pronunciation one can find the conventions used to represent sounds (within this book), either on the first pages or in an appendix. Are you sure there's nothing like this in the book you're referring to? The choice of 'j' is perfectly explainable by the fact it is used for the Й sound in IPA and many other, less standard, sound representation systems. – tum_ Nov 06 '16 at 21:36
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    If an English speaker is learning a foreign lanaguage it's mostly likely to be French, German or Spanish. In none of these is J routinely pronounced as in English. The only difference is that you're starting from a Cyrillic alphabet which has more letters than the (English) Roman alphabet and doesn't have the sound English-speakers use J for. That means that it's useful if you're going to transliterate without overloading characters or using two characters to represent one. – Chris H Nov 08 '16 at 09:35
  • The letter J, as I understand it, is often pronounced similar to Y in German (and Scandinavian languages). And J is pronounced similar to H in Spanish. Words from those languages will already have the J in them. And that answer you quote appears to be talking about how the letter J is pronounced (as when reciting the alphabet), not how J is pronounced when used in a word. – Hot Licks Feb 21 '17 at 21:11
  • FWIW, most native English speakers would read "ja" in dialog as "ya", understanding that it is German for "yes". – Hot Licks Feb 21 '17 at 21:15
  • "ja" is sometimes used in transliteration/Romanisation of Russian (and probably other Cyrillic Slavic) names into English, e.g. in the names Sonja and Nastassja. If you were following this, then of course you'd be consistent. Sadly, with the OP not providing properly-referenced examples it's hard to proceed. – Stuart F Jan 22 '24 at 17:18

2 Answers2

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There is no formal, accepted protocol for transliterating into English.

Tchaikofski

is my preferred way of writing the last name of the well known Russian composer

Пётр Ильич Чайковский

who was not known to write his name in English.
My spelling does not do well in a Google Ngram Google Ngram
However I write it as I say it (except for the double vowel at the end).

For example, my Ukrainian textbook says that the letter Я is pronounced as "ja".

If, in fact, this textbook is intended for use by English speakers, it is in error. That has to be the explanation, based on the facts provided. "Ya" would certainly be preferred to "ja".

Romanization is not really what happens when one attempts to write non-Roman alphabet letters in English. Romanization can render "Я" as "ja", as many languages using the Roman alphabet use "j" for a sound much like the English "y".Wikipedia A better term would be anglicization. Your textbook may have used a romanization that was not applicable to English.

J. Taylor
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  • The issue is more "Я", than either "y" or "j". The real issue is the phoneme "Я" which is pronounced "ya".. "Y" and "j" only figure in the first part of the phoneme "Я" – J. Taylor Feb 23 '17 at 21:06
  • There's a lot of variation in how Я is transliterated especially in names: Россия is usually known as Russia, although Russiya would be closer to the Cyrillic. This is so common in Slavic names (influenced by Latin etc where -ia is a common ending) it's practically a convention. – Stuart F Aug 24 '23 at 08:30
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My guess - and it's no more than just a guess - is that the book was written by a Slav and in Slavic languages, the sound of the English "y" as in "yet" or "yield" or "yarn" is represented by the letter "j" whereas the letter "y" is used for sounds similar to the English "i" as in "bitch" or "ee" as in "breed". This is also true for German and at least some of the Scandinavian languages, BTW. But in this case, I say cherchez le Slav.

eltomito
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