It's actually funny which name for countries ends up getting borrowed. The Finnish word for Finland is Suomi. The Swedish word for Finland is Finland. Ironically, the Swedish word for Sweden is Sverige, but at least you can see the Sw/Sv commonality.
No, in practice it is мова, and modern standard Ukrainian mainly uses inherited Common Slavonic *językŭ ‘tongue (organ); language’ only in its meaning ‘tongue’. The article for "Ukrainian language" at the Ukrainian Wikipedia is literally "Українська мова" [0]
The letters correspond. From the perspective of Russian, you can't know the pronunciation without knowing which syllable is stressed. Ова will be pronounced "ova" if the first syllable is stressed, but "ava" if the second is.
Most modern-day approaches to spelling foreign words aren't concerned with whether the spelling suggests anything close to the correct pronunciation. They concern themselves more, as here, with whether there is a system that suggests an "official" spelling.
Compare how Chinese immigrants in the 19th century might get names like 王 Wong, 李 Lee, or 魯 Loo, whereas Chinese immigrants today have names like 王 Wang, 李 Li, or 鲁 Lu.
Compare how Chinese immigrants in the 19th century might get names like 王 Wong, 李 Lee, or 魯 Loo, whereas Chinese immigrants today have names like 王 Wang, 李 Li, or 鲁 Lu.
I am afraid, your observations and conclusions are incorrect.
Wong, Lee (pronounced as Lei), Loo (pronounced and spelled as Law nowadays) are the Cantonese readings of Chinese names; whereas Wang, Li and Lü are Mandarin pronounciations of 王, 李 and 魯, respectively.
Lee (as «e» in Padme from the Star Wars) and Loo («oo» as in «door») are an artefact of one of the first attempts by the British to come up with the standardised English spelling for Chinese names they had perceived through the lens of the Cantonese language and culture. One would have to look back into the history of Europeans coming into the first contact with the Chinese civilisation, of which the British had been one of the first frontiers (let's not digress into a discussion of the historical background nor merits of that having taken place, for that is not the point I am trying to bring across).
The British had come into their first contact with the Qing China through Canton in the late 18th century where Cantonese was the prevailing language, with Mandarin (官話) being relegated to the status of the language of mandarins, the Chinese imperial court and those willing to pass imperial exams. It took the British (and European missionaries) a few decades to realise that China had had a multitude of different – often mutually unintelligible – Chinese languages, in which the same character (漢字) had a distinct pronunciation. Speakers of their own mother tongue (be it a Yue, Wu, Gan etc language) would pronounce the same 漢字 according to phonetic rules of their own native tongue. For instance, 林 is pronounced as «Lam» in Cantonese but as «Lin» in Mandarin; 吳 is «Ng» in Cantonese, but it is pronounced as «Goh» in Teochew and as «Wu» in Mandarin; likewise, 金 is «Gan» (Cantonese) vs «Jian» (Mandarin), 等等...
The first migration wave out of China into the US mostly came from Lingnan (the area encompassing Gwong Sai, Gwong Dung, Hoi Naam and parts of the today's northern Vietnam). The majority of them, however, spoke Teochew – a Yue Chinese language, that is related but is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese. US Chinatown dwellers used to speak Teochew for over a century before Cantonese started to take hold in the second half of the 20th century.
Since the migration of Chinese nationals had been forbidden since the times of the Ming dynasty, and with the British controlling the Canton port in the late 19th century onwards, Canton (Gwong Jau nowadays) was pretty much the only viable exit point for migrants out of China seeking an escape from the Qing for their own reasons; hence they would have had to obtain the exit immigration documents at Canton with their Teochew names spelled out using the English spelling the British had adopted for spelling out the Cantonese names earlier on. Hence Wong, Lee and Loo and not Wang, Li or Lü (or actual Teochew spelling). The former ones are in active use in Hong Kong today, whereas the latter ones are encountered in the mainland Chinese names.
> I am afraid, your observations and conclusions are incorrect.
You say that, and then you go on to demonstrate that you have no idea what you're talking about.
It's quite true that the earlier waves of Chinese immigrants spoke Min and Yue languages. That is the reason I didn't use 周 Chow/Zhou as an example. Those aren't the same sounds.
But it's not at all true that Wong and Lee reflect different sounds than do Wang and Li. They are one and the same. Furthermore, the Mandarin pronunciation of the surname 魯 is not lü, it is lu.
If a Mandarin speaker surnamed 王 wanted to have their name pronounced as closely as possible by English speakers, they would spell it Wong -- just as the southerners named 王 (and 黄) actually did when they arrived in the 19th century, or as they actually did in Hong Kong under the British. The spelling Wang concerns itself with an "official spelling" at the expense of readers being able to pronounce the name -- which, if you'll notice, is exactly what I said up above.
"Yazyk - Язык" is "language" is Russian. You know, because Russia took Crimea and eastern Ukraine is in civil war.
I learned Russian just so I could make politically edgy jokes, so this seemed like a good opportunity. Hopefully this will allow other ground dwellers to have a chuckle.
Russia annexed Crimea, and eastern Ukraine has been invaded by Russia, which is currently mostly using proxies in place of its own regular army, but these proxies have been created, trained, financed and armed entirely by Russia, and are therefore not a side in a civil war. Choice of words matters.
Well, as a joke it isn't a very good one in a "news for nerds" discussion like this, where someone could have been mistaken, or have been making the very valid point that many surzhyk speakers use jezyk in this context.
To add to this clarification: surzhyk is a continuum of regional language mixtures on the Ukranian <-> Russian gradient.
And something I learned just today is that the word's etymological ancestor means "with rye", referring to bread made of a mixture of rye and other flour.
