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Yeah, they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics. That is just insane.



> they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics.

That seems pretty unlikely to have happened here; I don't know the Russian word in question, but the Chinese "hui" rhymes with English "clay". (It also rhymes with the more sensibly spelled Chinese "wei"; the 'e' is only omitted when the syllable begins with a consonant. Compare "feng shui".) I'd be surprised if that were a possible reading of any Russian that might be transliterated "hui".


A native Russian speaker who is familiar with how Russian is usually transliterated, but unfamiliar with Chinese, would read it very similar to the Russian word in question ("khoo-y").

As to why the filter was applied to Latin characters - I'm not sure, but I'm assuming that's to prevent people from using translit to sneak in profanities. Of course, this ends up being a pointless game of whack-a-mole - there's so many possible ways to spell something like that with Unicode...


Huh, I looked up the word. хуй?

Looks like Russians and Americans can find common ground on thinking Chinese last names look like "penis", even if we're making fun of Wang and they're making fun of Hui.


In Chinese socialism is shè huì zhǔ yì, which had to be intentionally misromanized as шэхуэйчжуи to avoid dick jokes.


What's the mistake? Look up; хуэй is a much better representation of the pronunciation of 会 than хуй would be. The pinyin spelling "hui" omits the primary vowel of the syllable.


As another native Russian speaker, "i" isn't the most common transliteration for "й", and that's what bothers me here. "Hui" would be a plural, with an "и". Й is usually written as "y" or "j". Except when you're getting an international passport, then there's a good chance your name will end with "ii" because the federal migration service hates you.


It's not the most common transliteration, but it's common enough; and even in Cyrillic, if you see "и" where "й" would normally be expected, you'd usually read it like the latter; e.g. "йод" is sometimes spelled "иод", but everybody will read it the same. Given that the written distinction between и/й dates back to Peter's civil script reform, and that it wasn't even considered a separate letter of the alphabet until the 1918 spelling reform, it's not really surprising.


Hm. I thought Й was being used in the old style (pre-1918) writing as well? At least this[1] translator keeps it in masculine adjectives. Though it doesn't keep the dots on a Ё. I've never seen И substituted for Й, but Ё -> Е is common, especially in names (for example some people write "Артем" but everyone still reads it as if there's a "ё").

[1] http://slavenica.com


It was used before 1918 - it was first standardized in the Civil Script (1710). But it wasn't considered a separate letter until 1918 - so e.g. the standard alphabetic sorting ignored the distinction. For this reason, it wasn't always used consistently, although it was still much more consistent than Ё. And even today, "иод" is still considered valid spelling; indeed, it's the preferred one in scientific context.

This still shows up in some contexts - e.g. Й, like Ё, isn't used in bullet lists; try it in Word - it'll go from И straight to К.




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