I’m currently writing an article on Vasily Zaitsev, the WWII Russian sniper best known (to most people) for being the main character of Enemy At The Gates.
The thing is, I’ve come across a couple of different spellings of his name. Most of the reference material I have access to spells his name “Vasily Zaitsev”, but some other sources- notably Wikipedia- spell it “Vasily Zaytsev”. I’ve also seen his first name rendered as “Vasili” and “Vasyli”, just to add to the confusion.
Basically, I’d like to make sure I spell his name correctly (for obvious reasons!)… anyone out there able to clarify this one?
To write it the correct way, you’d have to write in Cyrillic. The Latin alphabet forms you’re choosing from are transliterations; they’re attempting to capture the pronunciation of the name in its native language. There’s no single “correct” way to transliterate from one alphabet to another. There are systems of transliteration for some languages, and some of them are fairly standard, but I’m not sure there’s a standard for Russian. Your best bet is probably to use the form that seems most common.
The form of name used by the Library of Congress (ignoring some diacritics) is “Zaĭtsev, V. G. (Vasiliĭ Grigorʹevich), 1915-1993 or 4”. That’s a standardised transliteration from the Cyrillic original.
I support Vasiliy Zaytsev, not because it’s “correct” but because I think it does the best job of showing the original spelling in a way that’s understandable to pronounce in English.
Or you could just call him Basil Bunny. Which is a nice alliterative translation
There is no real standardized way to transliterate names from Cyrillic into Roman script. The Library of Congress “standard” is standard only in that nobody but the LC and libraries following their cataloguing procedures uses it. However, with certain limited traditional exceptions (In Tchaikowsky and Chekhov, the first letter and the v/w are identical, but traditionally rendered as I have indicated), there are some usages that seem to be common practice.
There are five “hard” and five “soft” vowels and one “semivowel.” A and O present no problems – the “ah” and “aw” sound of short A and O respectively. Э is “hard” E with no preceding y- sound; E is the “soft” version, normally rendered as 'e after a consonant and Ye initially or after a vowel. “Yeltsin” begins with an E in Cyrillic. Ё is a “yoh” sound corresponding closely to E in how it’s transliterated. Likewise, Я is “soft A” – A after a consonant, Ya initially and often after a vowel, but with the standard exception that geographic locations in -ия, which is phonetically more accurate than English -ia, are generally rendered as that instead of -iya. (The country between Romania and Greece is Булгария in Russian, rendered Bulgaria rather than the more phonetically accurate “Boolgariya.” But note Chechnya, the land of the Chechen people, ending in just a -я and written -ya.) Similarly У and Ю are unpalatalized and palatalized U respectively – /oo/ and /yoo/ in sound. (Notice that English often palatalizes U in words, something it rarely does with other vowels.) But the tricky one is И and Ы – the first being a “soft” /ee/ sound that does affect the preceding consonant, and the second a “hard” vowel not common in English, very loosely akin to the vowel in jeune or Goethe or to Classic Greek upsilon. И is always translaterated as I; Ы may be rendered as I or as Y, apparently completely dependent on taste. The semivowel Й is used to form diphthongs by appending an /ee/ sound to the normal vowel, as in “Bolshoi” or “Stanovoy” and is usually but not always transliterated with a -y (notice that Bolshoi is an exception). If I recall correctly, “Vasily” (in whatever spelling) is in Cyrillic Василый and is most commonly rendered “Vasily” – but notice that -i and -iy are also acceptable; English seems to rebel at -yy.
