2016-03-31 7:51 GMT+02:00 Martin J. Dürst <[email protected]>: > > I'm not an expert in French or Dutch pronunciation or orthography, but as > far as I understand, transforming "L’Haÿ-les-Roses" to "L’Haij-les-Roses" > would be wrong because it would lead to a wrong pronunciation; if anything, > "L’Hij-les-Roses" would be closer.
No. The actual pronunciation would be closer to "L'a-i-lè-Roz'" (note the "H" is mute just like the final "es"). In Russian Wikipedia, it is currently transliterated to Cyrillic by ignoring the diaresis which is fundamental (as if it was written "Hay" or "Haie" in French), i.e. "aÿ" represented as a single Cyrillic vowel (French pronounces the two vowels "a" and "y" distinctly because of the diaeresis, this is the standard role of the diaeresis in French to separate letters, without even any diphtong, or just a very light diphtong between them in fast speech which still preserves the two vowels). Obviously the Russian transliteration is definitely wrong (but it has been borrowed automatically from Russian Wikipedia to OpenStreetMap). I don't think there's any attested usage in Russian with this faulty pronunciation, except when Russians will read the Russian Wikipedia writing this bad name in Cyrillic. Note that Russian Wikipedia is full of very strange (faulty or incoherent) translitterations of foreign terms, invented by some self-proclaimed "experts" (sometimes they mix an actual translation, sometimes they use transliteration. E.g. with the clealt faulty transliteration of "Seine-Saint-Denis" which transliterates the two first words (clearly distinct phonetically in French) with the same 3 Cyrillic letters, with strange approcimation of the actual phonetics, but not with the actual Russian translations of "Seine" and "Saint" : on compound names based on them, sometimes the Russian translation on Wikipedia is used, sometimes the transliteration without any consistence, this choice is completely arbitrary).
