Milosevic or Miloshevich
Martin Murray
Jugoslavia, having seen his name written in the Cyrillic alphabet in a
television programme. It should be pronounced Miloshevich. However it is
universally written in the English-speaking media as Milosevic, and hence
many people pronounce the sh as s. This is because these media omit the
accent (hacek) on the s which it would have if written in the Croatian
Latin alphabet. However nobody ever pronounces the final c as k or ts, as
it should be pronounced (in English or Croatian) if the acute accent it
bears in Croatian is omitted.
If we aren't going to use the accents (haceks aren't easy to get in most
character sets) shouldn't we be writing Miloshevich?
The inability of most Americans to pronounce the short o ([A.]) in
Miloshevich and Kosovo (giving us Milohsevic and Kohsuhvoh) is of course
another issue.
Martin Murray
David Nebenzahl
>
> I have only just discovered how to pronounce the name of the President of
> Jugoslavia, having seen his name written in the Cyrillic alphabet in a
> television programme. It should be pronounced Miloshevich. However it is
> universally written in the English-speaking media as Milosevic, and hence
>
So is the Serbian (and therefore also Croation) "s" always pronounced as
"sh", as in Hungarian?
This also reminds me of Robert Kaplan's book "Balkan Ghosts" (1994) [1],
in which he seems to spell some place names phonetically (according to
English pronunciation rules) rather than as usually transliterated: two
that looked odd to me were "Kossovo" and "Prishtina" (rather than
Pristina). I haven't seen these spellings anywhere else.
[1] A rather miserable book because of his overweening animus towards
the Turks and seemingly, by extension, anything "Eastern". It's also
hard to ignore the impression that the book is an homage to "Dame"
Rebecca West's earlier (circa WWII) writings on the Balkans.
Nevertheless a good basic source of background information about the
powder keg area.
Larry Phillips
wrote:
>If we aren't going to use the accents (haceks aren't easy to get in most
>character sets) shouldn't we be writing Miloshevich?
If you're going to complicate this, I'll just start calling him
"asshole". I know how to say that one.
--
---------------------------------------------------------------
I like deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound of them
as they go flying by.
http://cr347197-a.surrey1.bc.wave.home.com/larry/
Martin Murray
: Martin Murray wrote:
: >
: > I have only just discovered how to pronounce the name of the President of
: > Jugoslavia, having seen his name written in the Cyrillic alphabet in a
: > television programme. It should be pronounced Miloshevich. However it is
: > universally written in the English-speaking media as Milosevic, and hence
: > many people pronounce the sh as s. ...
: >
:
: So is the Serbian (and therefore also Croation) "s" always pronounced as
: "sh", as in Hungarian?
No. The Serbian s is written C and is pronounced like an English
(unvoiced) s. The letter in Milosevic is different and is always
pronounced sh (unvoiced). In Croatian (Serbian with a Latin alphabet) the
latter letter has the hacek to distinguish it from the former. In the
usual transliteration the distinction is lost, hence many people
mispronounce it.
Martin Murray
Ross Howard
wrote:
>If we aren't going to use the accents (haceks aren't easy to get in most
>character sets) shouldn't we be writing Miloshevich?
Ashk Sholana -- Ed.
(One for the *Eye* readers)
Ross Howard
-----------
While one person's comments maybe one person's treasure,
another person's comments maybe another person's garbage.
-- The Bun
David Barnsdale
<co...@zeus.bris.ac.uk> writes
>
>If we aren't going to use the accents (haceks aren't easy to get in most
>character sets) shouldn't we be writing Miloshevich?
The problem iz that az Serbo-Croat iz often
written with an alphabet that looks
like ours, the assumption iz made that
it iz the same alphabet which it iz
not. Serbo-Croat for Tsar
iz spelt Car for example.
At least with Russian the look is so different
that we can't ignore that they are different alphabets.
David
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