TheCentre wrote:dr_devious wrote:Haye wins by KO in first 3 rounds. I think hes too fast for Vlad and definitely has the power to win. Haye is also hungrier and more willing to put it on the line, Vlad is very safety first.
His name is written with a W, not a V.
I love that. Trying to be the smart one. Trying to show how smart you are by correcting someone not for boxing opinion, but on their English. I've done this on occasion myself, and, to be honest, unless it's a brazen attempt to rile Spud, it just makes you like a d1ckhead.
But at least when I did it, I made myself look like a prat and was right. You, on the other hand, went through all that trouble, made yourself look like a pedundum, as James Mac would say, only to be exposed as wrong.
Ukrainian is written not with the latin alphabet, like anglo-germanic or latin languages, but in a version of the cyrillic alphabet. So when we translate from one
language to the other, we must also transliterate from one
alphabet to the other. But as with the words of the languages themselves, there are often no direct translations from letters in one alphabet to those in another. There is no "th" or "h" sound in either Russian or Ukranian, and there is no "kha" sound like "Akhmed" in English. So we must approximate. That's why Harry Potter is Garry Potter in Russia and why I wonder sometimes who the f\/ck Prince Garry is.
Now, the Ukrainian alphabet is slightly different to the Russian alphabet, but the basics are the same. In Ukrainian and Russian the sound "veh", as in "voluptuous" is written with something we would recognise as looking just like a capital B. Now, we do have an equivalent to this, the letter ‘V’, so, actually, it
should be transliterated as a V, as Dr Devious wrote.
But, in practice, conventions sometimes get in the way. For instance, the Russian city Ekaterinburg would be transliterated into the latin alphabet far more precisely as Yekaterinburg, but it isn’t simply because the convention is to transliterate the Russian letter which looks like a capital ‘E’, and makes the sound “ye” as in “yes”, as a latin letter “e”.
In Klitschko’s case, though, it isn’t even an English convention that gives us the inaccuracy, it’s a
German convention. Wladimir made his name in Germany, where his name was spelled as per German transliteration convention, which denotes the ‘vee’ sound as the letter W. But because German and English both use forms of the latin alphabet, we didn’t see the need to transliterate and kept the W.
Funnily, we don't use Witali.
Something similar can be seen with the Crimean port Sevastapol. Again, the "vee" sound in the first syllable when written in cyrillic is with that letter that looks like a capital B. But, despite it being a vee sound, it's sometimes written in English as Sebastapol, as it is in The Economist magazine.
So eat that, lexicography-boy.
And next time you want to be a fastidious bore, you might want to do it in a field in which you possess knowledge beyond that which could easily be classified as f\/ck all.
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