Published: Mon 26 March 2018
By Yannick
In Word of the Week .
tags: Russian Cyrillic Utah fluff
Stranger in a Not-So-Strange Land
I was recently on a plane for the first time in a while. When clouds obscured the landscape below, I decided to engage with the screen in front of me. Prompted to choose a language I opted for one I don't know all that well (as has been my habit) — this time I chose Russian. True to form, I quickly decided I was lost and scrambled to switch back into English. However, instead of giving up altogether, I spent a little time memorizing the screen and then switched back into Russian. Using my newfound knowledge of the screen layout, I was able to navigate to the in-flight map and explore the now-foreign landscape of the Western United States. I tested my reading skills with the transliterations of Salt Lake City (Солт-Лейк-Сити), Ogden (Огден), and Provo (Прово), but had to supress a laugh when I reached Tooele.
Defiantly Unphonetic
Tooele is the name of a city, county, and a valley in Northern Utah. The spelling is treacherous: Upon hearing the name Tooele spoken out loud, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was spelled Tuwilla instead. To add insult to injury, it seems the original spelling was Tuilla . Having tricked many people before, the unphonetic spelling certainly confused the Russian-language in-flight map, which offered the following transliteration: Тооел.
Words with double o's are rare in Russian, but there are a few examples such as сообщение (message) and зоопарк (zoo). Using the pronunciation of these words as a guide, it would follow that Тооел should be pronounced tah-ah-el or even tah-ah-yel .
Russian Clash with the West
Being confused by Tooele is an understandable mistake. However, the in-flight map commits a more serious transgression by failing to be self-consistent. Indeed, just north of Тооел, we find the transliterations of West Jordan and West Valley City. These are rendered as Уэст-Джордан (Oo-est Djor-dan ) and Вест-Вэлли-Сити (Vest-Veh-lee See-tee ), respectively.
Or perhaps the in-flight map is paying homage to Utah's love of unconventional spellings .