Okay, odd question of the season…could anyone tell me what you’d normally call the Battle of Bull Run, in Russian?
Or it’s other name, the “Battle of Manassas,” for that matter—I don’t know how either name translates, or would be modified to be easily pronouncible, if at all.
Maybe I’m over-thinking it, but I’ve seen, for example, what Japanese has to do to loanwords. (American English does it’s share of linguistic mangling too, to be sure, but I think of it more as a form of endearment. )
Honestly, just in case some local linguistic or grammatical quirk would signifigantly effect how they’d be pronounced or transliterated, or if Russian scholars or historians interested in the U.S. civil war (y’know, cause that’s likely going to be a huge, wildly disparate group THAT has to me, I’m sure) have happened to come up with their own name for said battle, over the years, for whatever reason*.
So if, say, a Russian general was naming a military operation after the battle, it would sound something like Operacija Manassas, right?
*Hey, how many names, terms, and nicknames are there for WWII itself, right now, around the world?
A cursory glance at the origin indicates it was named after free-roaming cattle. Don’t know if that’s accurate, but then, wouldn’t the name be something like the translation of “Battle of Free-Roaming Cattle River” in Russian?
For what it’s worth, the Russian Wikipedia article on the U.S. Civil War transliterates them as “Булл-Ран” (pronounced something like “Bool-Rawn”, I believe) and “Манассас” (pronounced as in English):
As has been said, not all names survive the transition from one language to the next unscathed, for whatever reason (examples in the western world include Paris, Bruges, and the nation of Germany), and sometimes a name for a location or a battle might be a bit literal (ie: the Battle of Cowpens during the American Revolution, which took place near some cow pens)
It’s really fun when you study Chinese and discover that there are multiple names for some American places in Chinese. For example, San Francisco. To save you from the pinyin spelling, they sound like “San Fran Shir” and “Jiu Gin Shan” to English-speaking ears. There are also two or more names each for Chinatown, California, and Texas (three names for Texas that I’ve come across, two pronounced identically).
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