Quote Originally Posted by waxwing
Quote Originally Posted by scotcher
It's really very simple. Say your name out loud, then look at the cyrillic alphabet, and pick the letters that allow you to make the sound closest to what you just said. How you happen to spell your name with latin letters is totally irrelevant.
And that's exactly why I always try to insist on the term transcription, not transliteration, although no one ever takes any notice. They are completely different things.
Yeah fair enough, my bad, though the precise definition isn't really central to the point I was making.

And it's not actually as quite simple as that, it's a matter of custom as much as anything else, in these cases where no Cyrillic letter is quite right. You can buck the trend, but it seems a bit pointless.
Of couse it's as simple as that. Transcibe ( ) the name so that it matches the English pronunciation you use. Bollocks to custom or convention, you're the one who's going to have to live with it.

Since, as you say, there is no hard-and-fast way of defining a 'correct' English pronunciation in the first place, what's the point in worrying about how to transcribe it 'correctly'? If you pronounce it джаред the transcribe it джаред, if you pronounce it джэред then trabscribe it as джэред. If you happen to be French and you pronounce it as жаред then transcribe it as жаред. No-one can tell you that you're wrong, since the name doesn't exist in Russian, and there is no standard way of accurately transcribing English words into Russian, but there are definite vaules associated with the Russian letters.

Hell, it's not even like Russians all use the same system. My current passport has 6 russian visas in it, all issued at the same consulate, and they contain 4 different cyrillic spellings of my name!

But who cares? I certainly don't. If I have to transcribe my name I just transcribe it so that a Russian will pronounce it like I do (or as close as possible). It's no skin off my ass if anyone else gets it 'wrong'.

This problem arises because there is no currently available objective measure of phoneme closeness (or is there?). Maybe if you could decide how many degrees of freedom there are in human sound production, you could take the square root of the sum of the squared deviations across all the dimensions .. umm .. see what I mean?
And then with accents it just gets more complicated, although for some reason I've never understood, there's much less deviation in Russian vowel sounds than in English ones.
Absolutely agree. The range of different pronunciation in English is so vast, what amazes me is that we can all correctly identify them at all. So long as the grammar and vocabulary match up, someone from Alabama can talk quite effortlessly with someone from Swansea, in spite of the fact that the individual sounds each of them use to represent any given phoneme have almost nothing in common.