r/mildlyinteresting • u/saladfengas • 1d ago

Two books by the same company have different spellings of Rachmaninoff

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10

u/Gloomy_Researcher769 1d ago

From Google: Because the Russian language uses an alternative alphabet, his name is sometimes spelled in different ways in English (“Sergei” or “Sergey”, and “Rachmaninoff”, “Rachmaninov”, “Rakhmaninov” or “Rakhmaninoff”). “Sergei Rachmaninoff” is the way he spelled his own name when he resided in the United States.

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u/CombinationThese6654 1d ago

The rules for transliterating Russian are only fairly recent. Before that, a few different styles existed. The OV ending is currently preferred. 

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u/LFK1236 1d ago

And that changed on New Year's Day, 2002?

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u/CombinationThese6654 1d ago

They're just republishing an older version. The Russian transliteration rules I learned must have been in place at least by the '80s. 

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u/quipstickle 1d ago

One of them might be a ripov

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u/WalterCanyon 1d ago

This is quite common because of the different alphabet and (at the time) not conventional phonetic translation.

1

u/whitephos420 1d ago

Ones phonetical the other is literal

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u/Obelix13 ​ 1d ago

One is the English version and the other is French. Each language has its own rules of transliteration from different alphabets.

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u/Low-Woodpecker-5171 1d ago

You don’t even want to know what they did to Debussy 🫣