• ahnesampo@sopuli.xyz
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      8 months ago

      The last name of the president of Russia is Пу́тин. Since people can’t read that without knowing Cyrillic, we need a way to map Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. However, neither Cyrillic nor Latin script have universal pronunciations: the phonetic value of letters change depending on the language. This leads to the romanization of a name being different depending what the source and target language is. Пу́тин is Putin for Russian-to-English, but Poutine for Russian-to-French. They’re both equally correct, and neither is a change from the other.

      • John_McMurray@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I feel like this is advanced trollery, as “poutine” is a French Canadian word, not French French, and pronounced quite differently than Putin.

    • Magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh
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      8 months ago

      Yep, especially when they come from different alphabets. But we used to do it for English names too (mostly medieval ones though).