# Visual aesthetics of preferred spellings



## Villeggiatura

Semantics, phonetics, and calligraphy are irrelevant to what I'm about to explore.

1. Etymology-oriented
Some prefer the preservation of silent letters, e.g.
alcohol / alcool
doughnut / donut

2. Transliteration-related
For example, some prefer one spelling over another/the other in each pair/group:
Rachmaninoff / Rakhmaninov
Scriabin / Skrjabin
Tchaikovsky / Tschaikowski / Čajkovskij

Do you share any popular preference? Or have other personal preferences?

I have idiosyncratic preferences: sometimes when I come across a new word or name, before learning its meaning, etymology, and proper pronunciation, I spontaneously find the sequence of letters aesthetically appealing.


----------



## Ben Jamin

Villeggiatura said:


> 2. Transliteration-related
> For example, some prefer one spelling over another/the other in each pair/group:
> Rachmaninoff / Rakhmaninov
> Scriabin / Skrjabin
> Tchaikovsky / Tschaikowski / Čajkovskij
> 
> Do you share any popular preference? Or have other personal preferences?
> 
> I have idiosyncratic preferences: sometimes when I come across a new word or name, before learning its meaning, etymology, and proper pronunciation, I spontaneously find the sequence of letters aesthetically appealing.


Transliteration is one thing, and transcription i soemething else. In your example with
Чайковский the first version is an English transcription, the second looks like a mixture of German and French transcription, while the third one could be both a Czech transcription or a transliteration in an unspecified language. As you can see transcription tends to be very strongly dependent of the phonetics and spelling of the target language, while transliteration is less dependent, but not quite independent. I can't, however, see any use for esthetics here.


----------



## Villeggiatura

Ben Jamin said:


> Transliteration is one thing, and transcription i soemething else. In your example with
> Чайковский the first version is an English transcription, the second looks like a mixture of German and French transcription, while the third one could be both a Czech transcription or a transliteration in an unspecified language. As you can see transcription tends to be very strongly dependent of the phonetics and spelling of the target language, while transliteration is less dependent, but not quite independent. I can't, however, see any use for esthetics here.


For me, since there's no difference in pronouncing _Tchaikovsky / Tschaikowski / Čajkovskij_, and none of the spellings is original, the only reason to prefer any of them is visual aesthetics.


----------



## Ben Jamin

Villeggiatura said:


> For me, since there's no difference in pronouncing _Tchaikovsky / Tschaikowski / Čajkovskij_, and none of the spellings is original, the only reason to prefer any of them is visual aesthetics.


For me spelling "Tchaikovsky" in English is nonsensical. Not only the "T" is completely superfluous, but also the leters "y" and "i" should change place. A logical English transcription should be "Chaykovski".
A correct German transcription should be Tschajkowski (there is no better way of rendering a "_Č" _in German than "tsch", unfortunately), while _Čajkovskij _is a very good transliteration to any language.


----------



## Scholiast

Greetings, all


Villeggiatura said:


> For me, since there's no difference in pronouncing _Tchaikovsky / Tschaikowski / Čajkovskij_, and none of the spellings is original, *the only reason to prefer any of them is visual aesthetics*.


[my emphasis]
I don't think this can ever be quite right, for two reasons. First, the character of the font (or indeed the handwriting - anyone remember that?) makes an instant appeal to the visual sense, more immediately than the precise orthography. Secondly, with well-known names, such as "Tchaikovsky"/"Tschaikowski", there are already, in all the target languages, established transliterated conventions to follow, irrespective of aesthetic considerations, and it makes little sense to question these, any more than it does to challenge the spelling of native words.
But on a note of pedantic frivolity, I'll confess to preferring, when writing English words of Greek origin, to "Hellenize" words such as "emphasize" with a z (US style), because of the Greek -ιζειν root, while sticking to the BrE convention in "colonise", "realise" &c. AmE is horrendously wrong with "analyze", but "Italicise" confronts me with a problem.
Σ


----------



## Delvo

"Alcohol" without the "h" is just wrong. That would be a different pronunciation, and the English language has no word pronounced that way.

Similarly, a "w" in the name Чайко́вский makes no sense at all phonetically. That alphabet and language have a clear distinction between the sounds /v/ and /w/, and it's unmistakable which letter they use there.

Of the original examples, that only leaves "donut", which is part of a larger pattern in modern English of getting rid of our troublesome "gh" problem (rite, lite, thru, tuff, site). That's not æsthetics; that's just applied phonetic logic.


----------



## Scholiast

Sorry, back again:


Delvo said:


> makes no sense at all phonetically


Yes it does, in German, where w is consistently pronounced as v in modern English, and where Tschaikowski is the conventional spelling for the great composer.


Delvo said:


> Of the original examples, that only leaves "donut", which is part of a larger pattern in modern English of getting rid of our troublesome "gh" problem (rite, lite, thru, tuff, site). That's not æsthetics; that's just applied phonetic logic


"Applied phonetic logic" would then make it impossible to distinguish between "rite" and "right" or "site" and "sight", "ruff" and "rough", "thru" and "threw", and would moreover make "mite" (for example) into a disyllable, and indistinguishable in writing from the modal verb "might".
Quite apart from masking the origins, and in some dialects occluding the actual pronunciation...
Σ


----------



## Villeggiatura

Delvo said:


> "Alcohol" without the "h" is just wrong. That would be a different pronunciation, and the English language has no word pronounced that way.


_alcohol / alcool_ is not about English.



Scholiast said:


> I don't think this can ever be quite right, for two reasons. First, the character of the font (or indeed the handwriting - anyone remember that?) makes an instant appeal to the visual sense, more immediately than the precise orthography.


Premise: all spellings printed equal, no preferential font for one



Scholiast said:


> Secondly, with *well-known* names, such as "Tchaikovsky"/"Tschaikowski", there are already, in all the target languages, established transliterated conventions to follow, irrespective of aesthetic considerations, and it makes little sense to question these, any more than it does to challenge the spelling of native words.


Precisely, not for the majority of Russian names, some are actually quite famous in some circles internationally, such as
Пышнов: Pouishnoff / Pyshnov


----------



## Scholiast

Greetings again, and @Villeggiatura, I'm now not sure what your original question was asking. Пу́шкин is a little bit better known to me than Пышнов, but the issue of how to transliterate is common ground, as I have been a teacher of classical Greek for a while, and we must always make compromises somehow - in transl_iter_ation as in translation.
To me, it is not the shape of the words on a written or printed page that makes an effect, but the sounds as I read them, and the sense, as I comprehend them.
Σ


----------



## Ben Jamin

Don't confuse transliteration with transcription!
*Transliteration *is a systematic representation of words written in one alphabet using letters of another alphabet.
Example: Чайко́вский - Čajkovskij.
Nixon - Никсон

You don't transliterate words between to languages using the same alphabet. You can only transcribe them.

*Transcription *is a (more or less) systematic representation of word sounds in one language using spelling conventions of another language.
Example: Chirac (F) - Sheerack (E).
Χανιά - Khanya/Hanya/Chania


----------



## Panceltic

I understand the OP's question. I personally have "favourite" letters in various alphabets and also combinations. For example Cyrillic жд seems very beautiful to me, especially if written in cursive.


----------



## Scholiast

Greetings again,


Panceltic said:


> especially if written in cursive


Good, for me too - and I love the (Altschrift) German that my mother-in-law used to write. But that was handwriting, and I think Villeggiatura has already excluded this from the discussion.
Σ


----------



## Dan2

Delvo said:


> Of the original examples, that only leaves "donut", which is part of a larger pattern in modern English of getting rid of our troublesome "gh" problem (rite, lite, thru, tuff, site).


Just for the record I'd like to say a bit more about these five misspellings, since the status varies from one to another.  Putting aside SMS/texting, where anything goes, and near-illiteracy, "rite", "tuff" and, especially, "lite", are sometimes used in commercial product names; other than that, I don't think I've ever seen them used as serious re-spellings.  "site" for "sight" is only a typo or illiteracy.  "thru", on the other hand, is widely used informally.  (I personally think that there would be a lot of benefit to English-speaking children, foreigners, and people with reading disabilities (and no real downside) to adopting the spellings "thru" and "(al)tho".  I don't think I'd go beyond those two words, however.)  (Those two words because of their very high frequency and lack of involvement in any larger paradigm.)


----------



## fdb

The composer signed his name in Latin script as Tschaïkovsky. Surely people should have the right to spell their own names in any manner they like. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ilyich_Tchaikovsky#/media/File:Tchaikovksy's_signature.jpg


----------



## Ben Jamin

fdb said:


> The composer signed his name in Latin script as Tschaïkovsky. Surely people should have the right to spell their own names in any manner they like. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ilyich_Tchaikovsky#/media/File:Tchaikovksy's_signature.jpg


This proves that he didn't have much understanding of phonetics and spelling, it is like Sphinx, a combination of many parts that don't belong together: 
Tsch - German
aï - French, with a spelling suggesting a syllabic "i"
y -  German or English
This is neither a transliteration nor a consistent transcription.


----------



## Hulalessar

I do not know if Tchaikovsky knew English, but I would be surprised if he did not know French. The way he spelt his name in roman script is probably influenced by the way it would be written in French which has no /tʃ/ and where <ch> represents /ʃ/.


----------



## Hulalessar

Ben Jamin said:


> Don't confuse transliteration with transcription!
> *Transliteration *is a systematic representation of words written in one alphabet using letters of another alphabet.
> Example: Чайко́вский - Čajkovskij.
> Nixon - Никсон
> 
> You don't transliterate words between to languages using the same alphabet. You can only transcribe them.
> 
> *Transcription *is a (more or less) systematic representation of word sounds in one language using spelling conventions of another language.
> Example: Chirac (F) - Sheerack (E).
> Χανιά - Khanya/Hanya/Chania



I would emphasise that transliteration involves representing the letters of one alphabet with the letters of another _without regard to the sounds they represent_ so that if you know the characters and rules but not the language you can reproduce the original.

In most cases a perfect transliteration is only of use to someone who knows the language being transcribed.


----------



## Villeggiatura

Panceltic said:


> I understand the OP's question. I personally have "favourite" letters in various alphabets and also combinations. For example Cyrillic жд seems very beautiful to me, especially if written in cursive.


Spot-on
A beautiful spelling (sequence of letters) strikes me like a beautiful melody (sequence of notes), mysterious!
Good calligraphers enhance the beauty of spelling like good performers enhancing the beauty of melody


----------



## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> I would emphasise that transliteration involves representing the letters of one alphabet with the letters of another _without regard to the sounds they represent_ so that if you know the characters and rules but not the language you can reproduce the original.
> 
> In most cases a perfect transliteration is only of use to someone who knows the language being transcribed.


A very good point!
An example can be the ubiquitous transliteration of the Russian letter "e" as latin "e", which is completely confusing, giving for example the  letter sequence "её" (pronounced yeyo) transliterated and transcribed as "ee" (pronounced as a long "i" in English, or "e+e" in other languages).


----------



## Penyafort

I'd say it is mainly a matter of getting used to it. For instance, Genghis Khan in Spanish should be transliterated as Chinguis Jan, but all Spanish speakers are used to see it written as Gengis Kan and would find Chinguis Jan extremely weird. The problem? A Spaniard's pronunciation of it, /'xenxis'kan/, is quite far from the original.

It also depends on the phonology of the language. I find transliterations into Catalan more accurate in general than into Spanish because the phonological inventory allows this to happen, as Spanish lacks some sounds that are quite 'international' (or European, at least). So in Catalan we transliterate Доктор Живаго as Doctor Givago and say it almost as in Russian, while in Spanish, since the sound of that Ж doesn't exist, the transliteration is Doctor Zhivago and the pronunciation /θi'bago/ gets away from the original.

Then there is also the general influence of English and its transliterations. I was used to see the Bulgarian football player Стоичков transliterated both as Stoichkov (the one he had on his jersey) and Stòitxkov, the Catalan transliteration used in the media here. The same thing has traditionally happened with several placenames from distant areas that were introduced into Europe via English or French, such as Seoul (Seül in Catalan, Seúl in Spanish).


----------



## Hulalessar

Penyafort said:


> I'd say it is mainly a matter of getting used to it. For instance, etc



What you are referring to is not so much transliteration as transcription.

Transliteration is concerned solely with the accurate representation of one script by another. You set out a table where you provide that grapheme _x_ in one script is represented by grapheme_ y_ (or perhaps _yy_ or _yz_) in the other and keep to it whatever phoneme _x_ represents in the word in which it is found. Depending on the language transcribed you may or may not get some idea of the pronunciation if you are unfamiliar with it. A transliteration of a Russian text from Cyrilic into roman script will not present too many problems to someone who does not know Russian because on the whole most graphemes only have one value. On the other hand a transliteration of an English text from roman into Cyrillic will present considerable problems to anyone who does not know English because so many graphemes are polyvalent. A consistent and accurate transliteration is only of use in limited circumstances. A text book of a language which uses script A aimed at those who use script B may use a transliteration based on script B as an aid until the learner becomes familiar with script A. A transcription may also be used where a font of the script in which the language is written is not available and where the text is aimed at those who know the language being written.

Transcription is concerned with how the words are pronounced. If not intended to be wholly accurate, it will employ the conventions of the orthography of the language used by those the text is aimed at and where there are no equivalents fudge it.

For most practical purposes something approaching an established compromise is used. It is usually proper names which are being transcribed and they are likely to be mispronounced whatever system is used. Bear in mind that the roman script has different values according to the language written and few languages using the script are wholly phonemic so that mispronunciation by those who do not know the language is just as likely.


----------



## Gavril

I'm not sure if this is an answer to the original question, but I like to avoid "rare" orthographic conventions in transliterations. By "rare" I mean things that are only used in a handful of languages, even if these languages are very widely spoken. E.g., only a few languages (English, Spanish, Turkish, to a lesser extent French) seem to productively use "y" to represent [j] in their writing systems.


----------



## Ben Jamin

Gavril said:


> I'm not sure if this is an answer to the original question, but I like to avoid "rare" orthographic conventions in transliterations. By "rare" I mean things that are only used in a handful of languages, even if these languages are very widely spoken. E.g., only a few languages (English, Spanish, Turkish, to a lesser extent French) seem to productively use "y" to represent [j] in their writing systems.


But these conventions are dominant, and there is no other simple convention that is accepted universally. IPA alphabet has been created for linguists, and is too difficult for general public, and uses characters that are difficult to write and not largely understood.


----------



## Gavril

Ben Jamin said:


> But these conventions are dominant,



How so? At least within Europe this is not the case:

[j] = "j": all Germanic languages except English, all(?) Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, Finnish, Romanian, Albanian, etc.

[j] = "y": English, Spanish, French, Breton, (others?)


----------



## Ben Jamin

Gavril said:


> How so? At least within Europe this is not the case:
> 
> [j] = "j": all Germanic languages except English, all(?) Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, Finnish, Romanian, Albanian, etc.
> 
> [j] = "y": English, Spanish, French, Breton, (others?)


This is true, but the domination of English makes all too many use the English convention. I'm really flabbergasted when I see all the countries you mentioned doing it the English way. Even the Slavic countries tranliterate names from Cyrillic to their own languages using the English conventions. The same happens to pronunciation of foreign names. In Norway for example there is a tendency to pronounce German names in the English way. People don't travel any longer to München or Köln but to Mjunik and Kolonj.
This is ugly to my eyes and ears.


----------



## fdb

German “Köln” and French/English “Cologne” both go back to “Colonia Claudia”. This is not about transliteration, but about historic sound change.


----------



## apmoy70

Ben Jamin said:


> This is true, but the domination of English makes all too many use the English convention. I'm really flabbergasted when I see all the countries you mentioned doing it the English way. Even the Slavic countries tranliterate names from Cyrillic to their own languages using the English conventions. The same happens to pronunciation of foreign names. In Norway for example there is a tendency to pronounce German names in the English way. People don't travel any longer to München or Köln but to Mjunik and Kolonj.
> This is ugly to my eyes and ears.


Unfortunately the same trend is followed in MoGr too. Quite often one hears anchoremen/anchorewomen on television news programmes, to arbitrary pronounce foreign names or toponymics by using the English pronounciation, quite often a hybrid between the BrEng & the AmEng. Thus you often read and hear the abomination «Ουόσι*ν*γκτον»  [ɣʊˈoʃiŋgton] for the US capital, instead of the accepted «Ουάσιγτον» [uˈasiŋgton] or even the semi-obsolete nowadays, Katharevousa-_ish_ «Βάσιγκτον» [ˈvasiŋgton]. Greek has neither the [ʃ] nor the [ʊ] sounds, while the internal /γκ/ is almost always the consonant cluster [ŋg]


----------



## Ben Jamin

fdb said:


> German “Köln” and French/English “Cologne” both go back to “Colonia Claudia”. This is not about transliteration, but about historic sound change.


I did not criticise the English use of the exonym "Cologne". There is no reason for that. 
I am criticizing the Norwegian trend of adopting an English pronunciation of a German city, which is breaking of the many century long convention of using German names for German towns, and the phonetical affinity of the German and Norwegian language. It is not far until Göteborg in Sweden will be called Gothenburg, with pure English pronunciation.


----------



## Penyafort

Hulalessar said:


> What you are referring to is not so much transliteration as transcription.



True, thank you for the appreciation. I'd say I was actually referring to both as just one, mainly considering that compromise that you mention in your post.


----------

