Romanization of Ukrainian
In contrast to romanization, there have been several historical proposals for a native Ukrainian Latin alphabet, usually based on those used by West Slavic languages, but none have been widely accepted.
It is purely phonemic, meaning each character represents one meaningful unit of sound, and is based on the Croatian Latin alphabet.
[3] A variation was codified in the 1898 Prussian Instructions for libraries, or Preußische Instruktionen (PI), and widely used in bibliographic cataloguing in Central Europe and Scandinavia.
[6] Revised tables including Ukrainian were published in 1941,[7] and remain in use virtually unchanged according to the latest 2011 release.
In addition to bibliographic cataloguing, simplified versions of the Library of Congress system are widely used for romanization in the text of academic and general publications.
For notes or bibliographical references, some publications use a version without ligatures, which offers sufficient precision but simplifies the typesetting burden and easing readability.
For specialist audiences or those familiar with Slavic languages, a version without ligatures and diacritical marks is sometimes used.
[10] For broader audiences, a "modified Library of Congress system" is employed for personal, organizational, and place names, omitting all ligatures and diacritics, ignoring the soft sign ь (ʹ), with initial Є- (I͡E-), Й- (Ĭ-), Ю- ( I͡U-), and Я- (I͡A-) represented by Ye-, Y-, Yu-, and Ya-, surnames' terminal -ий (-yĭ) and -ій (-iĭ) endings simplified to -y, and sometimes with common first names anglicized, for example, Олександр (Oleksandr) written as Alexander.
British Standard 2979:1958 "Transliteration of Cyrillic and Greek Characters",[15] from BSI, is used by the Oxford University Press.
The Soviet Union's GOST, COMECON's SEV, and Ukraine's Derzhstandart are government standards bodies of the former Eurasian communist countries.
An updated 2010 version became the system used for transliterating all proper names and was approved as Resolution 55 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, January 27, 2010.
[23][24] This modified earlier laws and brought together a unified system for official documents, publication of cartographic works, signs and indicators of inhabited localities, streets, stops, subway stations, etc.
The 27th session of the UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) held in New York 30 July and 10 August 2012 after a report by the State Agency of Land Resources of Ukraine (now known as Derzhheokadastr: Ukraine State Service of Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre) experts[25] approved the Ukrainian system of romanization.
[28] Romanization intended for readers of other languages than English is usually transcribed phonetically into the familiar orthography.
For example, y, kh, ch, sh, shch for anglophones may be transcribed j, ch, tsch, sch, schtsch for German readers (for letters й, х, ч, ш, щ), or it may be rendered in Latin letters according to the normal orthography of another Slavic language, such as Polish or Croatian (such as the established system of scientific transliteration, described above).
Users of public-access computers or mobile text messaging services sometimes improvise informal romanization due to limitations in keyboard or character set.
Phonetic transcription represents every single sound, or phone, and can be used to compare different dialects of a language.
In many contexts, it is common to use a modified system of transliteration that strives to be read and pronounced naturally by anglophones.
Typically such a modified transliteration is based on the ALA-LC, or Library of Congress (in North America), or, less commonly, the British Standard system.
Such a simplified system usually omits diacritics and ligatures (tie-bars) from, e.g., i͡e, ï or ĭ, often simplifies -yĭ and -iĭ word endings to "-y", omits romanizing the Ukrainian soft sign (ь) and apostrophe ('), and may substitute ya, ye, yu, yo for ia, ie, iu, io at the beginnings of words.
For example, the English translation of Kubijovyč's Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopædia uses a modified Library of Congress (ALA-LC) system as outlined above for Ukrainian and Russian names—with the exceptions for endings or doubled consonants applying variously to personal and geographic names.
