Talk:Beryozovsky, Kemerovo Oblast

Березовский or Берёзовский? (Berezovsky or Beryozovsky?)

The official website of the city at [1] does not have the umlaut over the second vowel. Backspace 08:36, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

See WP:RUS, Romanization of Russian. - Darwinek 22:50, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for directing me to that article, but this was not a question about Romanization; it was a question about the correct spelling of the word. Backspace 16:51, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

The correct spelling is "Берёзовский" (Beryozovsky). The reason why this is not a spelling of choice of the official website and of many other sources is because Russian letter "ё" is considered somewhat optional, and (extremely) often is replaced with "е" instead of being written out properly (leading, accordingly, to a different romanization; in this case Berezovsky). This, of course, does not affect the way the word is pronounced in any way (native speakers usually know which words contain "ё and which—"е", but there is no rule that would help determine this to a person for whom Russian is not a native tongue). There is a little on this phenomenon in the Yo (Cyrillic) article. In reference materials, of course, it is imperative that this difference is pointed out. Suffice it to say, that while the name of this particular place is often spelled "Березовский", it is never supposed to be pronounced the same as the last name of the Russian businessman Березовский. Of course, in case of smaller villages even native speakers can easily be at lost whether the name of a place should be spelled with a "ё" or a "е"—only local residents or toponimic reference materials can help in such cases. Hope this helps.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 18:22, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

That "Yo" article is pretty interesting. It would never occur to me that people would intentionally misspell a word expecting the user to know the "real" spelling by past experience. I guess that this could be compared to the commonly-seen phenomenon of dropping off the accent on capital letters such as É and Î in French or Á in Spanish (they always seem to keep it in lower-case letters, for some reason). It drives me crazy when they do that. (I tend to be a spelling freak.) Backspace 20:42, 24 July 2007 (UTC)