Volodymyr Zelenskiy declared his personal income for the first time since the outbreak of war with Russia, as part of his effort to increase transparency in his government.
In 2021, the year before Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelenskiy and his family reported income of 10.8 million hryvnia ($285,000), down 12 million hryvnia from the previous year, even as his income was boosted by the sale of $142,000 of government bonds, according to a statement on his website.
In 2022, the first year of the Russian invasion, the Zelenskiy family’s income fell further to 3.7 million hryvnia as he earned less income from renting real estate he owned because of the hostilities.
Even as the war allowed Ukrainian officials to withhold revealing sensitive personal information, Zelenskiy pushed to make them publicly declare assets. Increasing transparency and tackling graft are necessary for his country to ensure continued financial aid from its western allies, even as more than $100 billion of funds are held up due to political maneuvering inside US and EU.
His actual name is written in Cyrillic so the latinized versions are all just ways of trying to write a bunch of latin letters that roughly correspond to how his name is pronounced. That’s going to be quite different across languages that use the latin alphabet, even across different accents in the same language.
If you were to write a word like 🚽 the way it actually sounds, would it be toy-let (canadian), tuy-leht, (if you’re from parts of britain) tay-let (if you’re australian), tee-let (new zealand)….?
Ey mate, shitters clogged
Very much this.
The suffix at the end of that last name is also causing some trouble:
Now compare it to the last name of a Polish author: Сапковський (Ukrainian), Сапковский (Russian), Sapkowski (Polish).
Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles all have examples of last names like these, but the rules of our languages dictate that we handle them differently, even in terms of spelling and pronunciation; for people not speaking a Slavic language naturally, it understandably is a nightmare, as neither spelling is objectively the right one in terms of linguistics.
For now, it’s probably best to either go with one of the following:
As messy as it seems, I believe it’s going to stay the same. Romanization of the Russian language is already an equally messy phenomenon despite multiple efforts to standardize the process, yet it only resulted in several ways of tackling the difficult cases, which is of very little help; Ukrainian seems to be an even more complicated case for romanization as it has some features that would either require intricate rules to create accurate spellings, or make greater use of diacritics.
And in Czech it would be Zelenský.
Diacritics: the bread and butter of the Slavic languages.
Slavs are pretty fucked. My fav is a name Артём that defies any hope for a consistent translation.
Artyom?
Due to Ё being randomly changed into Е in some formal documents, both Artyom and Artem are seemingly valid transcliterations, and this Ё can be written in many ways, all of them far from original spelling.
My source of credibility is that I’ve studied linguistics and translation/interpreting and got a BA on the matter, so I’m not talking out of my ass entirely.
Get ready for some dorky read.
Artyom is pretty much the expected translation, regardless of the original spelling: like with Sapkowski becoming Сапковский in Russian, which may not be what the original pronunciation or spelling intended, but that’s fine, because it’s intended to be used in a different language.
If you want to follow the spelling example, then every language is fucked because King George is very far from the Russian equivalent of Король Георг, let alone the fact that individual vowels and consonants and then their combinations are all, in fact, different sounds between languages. None of it means a translation isn’t accurate or right - it’s about ideas and legibility, comprehension achieved with the means of a target language first and foremost, no matter the limitations or differences of the source language.
Back to Artyom, regardless of the spelling I Russian, either Артём or Артем, you pronounce it the same, so it makes most sense to spell it as Artyom in English.
@[email protected] said languages should translate words phonetically, but that’s far from practical or comprehensive in general - but it has applications in proper names, and even then there are exceptions to handle stylistic or purely linguistic aspects.
And none of that is strictly a solely Slavic problem. It’s not even a problem, actually.
It’s indeed a problem when you get international documents where you are sometimes written as Artem or Artyom, and you are just Art’om. If you don’t insist on one translation, you’d get many problems with documents not being consistent.
My bad, I see now.
Still not a Slavic problem primarily, as far as I know - it’s just the Russian language being kinda bad at spelling, especially when it comes to Ё. Learning German made me realize the true value of Umlauts and clear, consistent rules for using them in a given language with definite alternatives for cases when they can’t be used as is, such as email addresses and other tech areas dominated by the Latin/English alphabet.
I’d make it a strict rule to never use Е instead of Ё - they’re not interchangeable in any way; maybe there was a period of time when typewriters couldn’t conveniently take this letter into account, but in the digital era, with its greater ease of typing, there’s really no excuse in going with Е instead of Ё, ever. If that was the standard, I’m sure some relatively short time in the future the inconsistent transliteration could be much less of a problem for all the Russian-native Artyoms out there.
As for the international documents… I believe a proper standard would suffice, one that would define proper and correct translations for names. There probably is one (or one thousand) already, but it doesn’t seem like it’s that definitive after all.
I could wish that to be truth, but standartization doesn’t seem to be doable. One of the biggest blows to it’s concept comes from bolsheviks’ passportisation effort, where any initial standard was absent (and, honestly, both scribes and people were of questionable literacy). It cemented different forms even for names that were borrowed from other languages, invented it’s own and even saved a suffix to the sense of ‘X’s son’ for one of it’s nations, Azeri. With that, and a confusing two-sided pull for both russification and codification of national languages, it all came to mess. I do think this affected most soviet nations, but indeed Ё is only our pain I think.
Sadly enough Ё is lasily avoided even by state’s officials and press. There’s where this trend of saving it should’ve been started. Even M$ Word can be put to mark misuse of Е as a mistake – that’s for an American corporation – but those screaming about rusophobia and cultural erasure can’t move a finger a bit further one time per a paragraph.
I too adore German from my little time with it back in school. Sometimes pretty complex, but at least consistent. These two funnily resemble how the law is stereotypically applied both here and there. Except for genders, they suck in both. Learning English made me love genderless words and the struggle of local feminists to unificate feminine nouns in Russian, well, I loved the idea but sighed at execution.
When I was writing it, I remembered a thing that puts my sorrow over one letter to shame. Tajik language which sounds very lovely if spoken by natives has been written in three alphabets in the last century: cyrillic, latinic and arabic scripts. Let this rabbit hole be my thank-you gift for an interesting discussion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajik_language
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As someone who is learning Japanese all languages should translate words phonetically
The problem is that English has few phonetic rules. It’s a huge mess
I’m Australian and we don’t pronounce it “tay-let”
That sounds like someone trying to badly imitate Australian accents but having the pronunciation very wrong
I don’t know how you managed to butcher it so badly
All my life I have pronounced it “toy-let” and I grew up in Australia
“tay-let” sounds like some weird portmanteau with “taylor” and “let”
If yer Scruffy, yuh pronounces it ‘terlet.’
Same in the British attempt (which… with a lot of different accents doesn’t make much sense either).
Is there not a standardized translation for Ukrainian Cyrillic to English? Every other language seems to manage it.
Also accents don’t change your spelling. We all still spell it toilet.
It’s a bit more difficult, since you have to substitute letters and pronunciations that don’t really exist in the Latin alphabet e.g. Я>ya, Щ>shch. For English there is no one correct pronunciation of words so there are regional differences. The the way you would write these sounds drifts even further apart in other languages, in German I would write the two examples like: Я>ja, Щ>schtsch
Not sure if that helps but translating what essentially boils down to different sounds is a bit of a mess.
The best part about standardization is picking the one you want to use the most.
Average Kanji enjoyer.