I can’t speak for Greek, but there are several transliteration systems in use for Russian. The Library of Congress system, which is concerned with letters, not sounds, is used a lot, but has some shortcomings (it transliterates й and ы the same way, and doesn’t distinguish between е, э, and ё ). Some systems are more concerned with sounds (so they might write “его” as “yevo”), and some are just ad-hoc and don’t have much consistency.
The Library of Congress romanization doesn’t use the same transliteration for й and ы. Maybe you’re thinking of the BGN (Board of Geographic Names), which transliterates both of those letters as “y.” BGN romanization is officially used by the National Geospatial Agency, which makes maps for the Defense Department, and has also been adopted by the National Geographic Society.
The LC romanization reserves y only for ы. For й, it uses the letter i with a breve over it (that same curved line you see over й). LC romanization also distinguishes between Russian е and ё: it uses e for the former and ë for the latter (even though the latter is actually pronounced “yo”). BGN uses ye and yo, respectively, but when е follows a consonant, it’s “e,” the same as for э.
I explained it right in the very post you quoted. Look again.
The Cyrillic letter you mention is “e,” which looks exactly the same as the Roman e. In Russian it’s pronounced ye at the beginning of a word or following a vowel. As in Dostoevskii and Eltsin, also known as Dostoyesvky and Yeltsin. When Russian wants to write the sound e, not ye, at the beginning of a word, it uses the letter э.
In general, Greek, when not an attempt to transliterate the precise spoken forms being used, takes the “classical” transliteration devised by Roman scholars to render Greek words in the Latin alphabet for borrowing purposes, as modified in the Middle Ages. Upsilon, for example, becomes “y”, even though it is never sounded with any of the standard English “y” sounds, except when it’s part of a Greek diphthong, where it becomes “u”. Chi is always “ch” even though it does not take the /tsh/ sound of English “cherry” or “chortle.”
There is no standard for Cyrillic transliteration – the LC system is the most common, but everybody has a different version, and Tchaikovsky is never rendered the LC “Chaikovski” outside the realms of LC-using libraries. There are other standards nearly as popular, including one that more or less uses German forms as a pass-through, and no one means of transliteration has anything like a consensus.
A few simple customs do seem to be standard (outside LC system, at least): The iotated vowels (“palatalized vowels”) tend to be transliterated initially and after vowels with a leading “y” except for initial {I-O} (I refuse to try to encode Cyrillic) which is rendered simply “U” – after consonants, the palatalization is represented by a leading apostrophe. So the classic “reversed R” representing the /ja/ sound is “Ya-” initially and “-iya-” or “-aya-” after vowels medially or terminally, but “-t’a-” where it follows the consonant “t” and similarly for other consonants. X is transliterated Kh, “chah” (resembling an open-topped 4) is “Ch,” and the gamma-like fourth letter of the Russian alphabet is always rendered as a “g,” even when it has the “v” sound penultimately. “Reversed N with a micron,” the diphthong-forming letter, is generally rendered as a “y,” while Cyrillic Y itself, with the uniotated U sound, is usually rendered as a U.
Fair enough; I was going by that page I linked to in my response. I confess to being totally unfamiliar with the LC system of transliteration – I’ve little need for it, being able to read the Cyrillic alphabet as well as I read the Roman. I saw BGN in use when studying Russian geography, but I preferred to stick to my professor’s collection of Soviet-produced maps, which were of better quality. Very well. I hereby declare the LC system to be cool, and the BGN system to suck.
When I absolutely need to transliterate some Cyrillic for some purpose, I tend to handle the iotations like so: я, е, ё, and ю are “ja”, “je”, “jo”, and “ju”. Й is “j”, and since й will never be found immediately following a consonant, I use “j” for ь as well. So шесть is “shestj”, мой is “moj”, and яблоко is “jabloko”. I try to reserve “y” for ы. It can produce some ugly spellings, but it’s consistent, unambiguous, and doesn’t require a bunch of diacritics or apostrophes. The other non-English-corresponding characters I transliterate: ч as “ch”, х as “kh”, ц as “c”, ш as “sh”, щ as “shch”, and ж as “zh”. Ъ, when needed, can just be replaced with a hyphen.
Hey, so do I. I just have Windows configured so that a simple key combination will switch between English and Cyrillic layouts. There’s no reason to jack with ʚ thingies if you don’t have to.
LC romanization uses all of these, except that ц is “ts.” Thus LC has Eltsin where you would write Jelcin and everybody else knows him as Yeltsin.
The spelling Jelcin, to take an example, looks straight out of Poland. I have often seen the flavor of transliteration you use, favored by Slavicists, and it looks to me to be influenced by Polish spelling.
German transliteration of Russian? I’m just glad the Soviet Union fell, because now I don’t have to see Der Spiegel writing about the “Sowjet” and think of porcine aircraft. Also, “Tschaikowsky” and “Khruschtschew” just have way too many letters.
See, the problem I have with using “ts” for ц is that it can be ambiguous whether one means ц or тс, and you wind up with spellings like “ottsy” for отцы (which I would transliterate “otcy”). I’m aware that my spelling looks a lot like Polish; sometimes for fun, and to mildly irritate Russians, I’ll make it look even more like Polish and start writing things like “Czajkowski”. This is probably because Polish was the first Slavic language I was exposed to, and because it has a halfway decent orthography, better than Latinica, even though I think all Slavic languages would benefit from using the Cyrillic alphabet (or, if people see that as too Russo-centric, we could all use Glagolitic).