The integration of foreign words from European languages into the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets

There are several ways of integrating foreign words (including proper names) graphically. The aim of practical transcription is to represent the foreign pronunciation with native orthographic rules, whereas transplantation, transliteration, and exact phonetic transcription conserve the orthography and/or pronunciation of the original. A special feature of Cyrillic writing systems as opposed to Latin ones seems to be that they completely rely on native pronunciation rules and do not allow the integration of foreign orthographic conventions. That this is indeed a matter of alphabet rather than of language type becomes quite obvious when comparing Serbian with Croatian: The two languages essentially have the same grammar and the same orthography, but Croatian is always written in the Latin alphabet and Serbian uses Latin and Cyrillic letters equally, i.e. it has one orthography but two scripts (with biunique correspondences between the graphemes). Consequently, foreign words are always transcribed according to their pronunciation in Serbian (e.g. Cirih or Цирих), whereas into Croatian especially proper names are usually transplanted in their original orthography (e.g. Zürich). However, due to globalization and the use of computer-based text processors, transplantation of Latin-alphabet (especially English) words into Cyrillic texts is becoming more frequent, particularly in Russian.

Originally written in English as “Foreign words and Cyrillic” for the thematic session “Integration of foreign words” at the 24th annual conference of the Linguistic Society of Germany (DGfS) in Mannheim and presented on 28 February 2002, but published in Russian as “Integracija inostrannyx slov iz evropejskix jazykov v kirillice i latinice” in Kotjurova, Marija P. (ed.), Filologičeskie zametki: Mežvuzovskij zbornik naučnyx trudov, vypusk 2, vol. 1, 122–150. Permʹ: Permskij gosudarstvennyj universitet 2003. DOI: 10.18716/bun/iskl.