European Emigrant Heritage

TRANSLITERATION VARIANTS           by James Hannum

There are usually more than one accepted transliteration of a word or name, from the Russian and Ukrainian alphabets into the Roman (English) alphabet.  Examples:

Михайло = Mykhailo or Myhailo

Ольга = Olga or Olha

Цар = Tsar, Tzar, or Czar

Russians and Ukrainians use any of the above spellings, depending on their personal preferences; each is an accepted transliteration into English from the Russian or Ukrainian spelling.  The reason for this is that the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets do not correspond well in their sounds.  That is, both alphabets have many sounds that do not really exist in the other, so there are more than one accepted way to transliterate a word.   The sound "zh" does not exist in the English language, for example, and is written in the Cyrillic alphabets of Russian and Ukrainian as an "x" with a vertical line through the middle.

Here is an example, from an analysis we did in a recent case: 

When Nekhemiya ROTH signed her name to the 14 August 1926 letter, it appears that she merely copied the spelling as it was printed in Ukrainian on the signature line.  When the clerk typed this letter, he spelled her name just as it is spelled on her appostiled ZAGS records.  He did not type it as she had spelled it herself on the earlier letters, perhaps because of his own personal preference against mixing alphabets.  Nekhemiya of course had the right to sign her name (make her mark) in any way she chose.  In the 1927 letter, where there was nothing for her to copy, she chose to write it with mixed alphabet and transliteration (spelling) that did not match the ZAGS documents, but who is to say she is wrong in this?  There is more than one accepted way to transliterate (spell) her name. 

Lets look at the alphabetic letters Nekhemiya used to sign her name in the 1927 letter.  The letter "J" does not exist in the Russian and Ukrainian alphabets.  It is a Polish letter, corre-sponding in sound fairly closely to the Roman "Y."  The next letter she wrote is a Y, pro-nounced in Russian and Ukrainian as the letters oo in the English word "food."  The other letters in her signature are the same as her 1926 signature, until you get to the second to last letter, which looks like a lower case b and an upper case I.  These look like two letters, but in the Russian alphabet they are one letter, pronounced like no sound in the English language, but sounding like a cross between an "I" and a "U."  In the first document she uses this Russian letter, but in the second document, the distribution letter, she copies our transliteration and uses the "backward N," one of the Russian "I" letters.

Nekhemiya wrote of her childhood during the end of the czar (tsar) Nicholas II reign.  As you know, the big trouble began in 1905 in the old Russian Empire (Ukraine was in said empire), with the first failed revolution, which was followed by years of bloody reprisals, economic devastation, and fighting between Reds and Whites, which was heaviest in the years following the "Russian Revolution of 1917," but continued with enough violence and uncertain outcome to continue the chaos in the life and law of the people until the mid-1920's. 

Nekhemiya was born in Ukraine in 1911.  Her school years were spent more finding enough food than with education.  Most of the western half of Ukraine, including the entire region where Nekhemiya was born, was Poland until the year 1945.  Nekhemiya therefore learnt what little reading and writing she could in both Polish and Ukrainian, as well as Russian.  As I saw in a handwritten short note she once sent me, her spelling abilities in her native language are extremely bad.   There were four or five spelling mistakes on each line, and she mixed her alphabets. 

School learning was particularly difficult during the first half of the 20th century for the Jews.  Nekhemiya is a diminutive variant of the feminine given name Nekhomo, found in the book Russian-Jewish Given Names (1998) by Boris Feldblyum, Pg. 64:  "Nekhomo... Nakha, Nakhe, Nekhamka, Nakhama, etc."  We will need to introduce more acceptable evidence of all the above if this case does not settle and goes to trial.

The Belarussians (who mostly speak only Russian today, not Belarussian, due to the USSR years), sometimes transliterated the "A" in HANNUM to a Cyrillic (Russian) "A," but the officer handling my visa application once insisted that HANNUM should be transliterated as it was on my Ukrainian visa etc., with the Belarussian "E."  Neither the A nor the E have the exact right sound, so it was a tossup... but the visa officer was adamant, and claimed that there was no proof I was the same person as in the other documents; I had entered Belarus from Ukraine.  Finally we convinced her on every point of the name except the double "N."  In Russian double Ns are pronounced twice, with an audible syllible break between them.  She insisted that the Ukrainian documents containing a single N was a different name, and we had to spend three hours finding and procuring a new translation and notarisation, this time with a single N: ГАНЕМ (GANEM), for Russian has no letter "H" and transliterates it as a G!  Heinrich Himmler is transliterated as Ginrek Gemler!

All this can make big difficulties in genealogical research.  It's bad enough that some people didn't know how to spell their own names (or what year they were born in), but when transliteration vagaries give governmental officials options on how to spell the surnames and village names, a lot of time can be spent going down the wrong paths.