Volodymyr Zelenskiy declared his personal income for the first time since the outbreak of war with Russia, as part of his effort to increase transparency in his government.
In 2021, the year before Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelenskiy and his family reported income of 10.8 million hryvnia ($285,000), down 12 million hryvnia from the previous year, even as his income was boosted by the sale of $142,000 of government bonds, according to a statement on his website.
In 2022, the first year of the Russian invasion, the Zelenskiy family’s income fell further to 3.7 million hryvnia as he earned less income from renting real estate he owned because of the hostilities.
Even as the war allowed Ukrainian officials to withhold revealing sensitive personal information, Zelenskiy pushed to make them publicly declare assets. Increasing transparency and tackling graft are necessary for his country to ensure continued financial aid from its western allies, even as more than $100 billion of funds are held up due to political maneuvering inside US and EU.
His actual name is written in Cyrillic so the latinized versions are all just ways of trying to write a bunch of latin letters that roughly correspond to how his name is pronounced. That’s going to be quite different across languages that use the latin alphabet, even across different accents in the same language.
If you were to write a word like 🚽 the way it actually sounds, would it be toy-let (canadian), tuy-leht, (if you’re from parts of britain) tay-let (if you’re australian), tee-let (new zealand)….?
Ey mate, shitters clogged
Very much this.
The suffix at the end of that last name is also causing some trouble:
Now compare it to the last name of a Polish author: Сапковський (Ukrainian), Сапковский (Russian), Sapkowski (Polish).
Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles all have examples of last names like these, but the rules of our languages dictate that we handle them differently, even in terms of spelling and pronunciation; for people not speaking a Slavic language naturally, it understandably is a nightmare, as neither spelling is objectively the right one in terms of linguistics.
For now, it’s probably best to either go with one of the following:
As messy as it seems, I believe it’s going to stay the same. Romanization of the Russian language is already an equally messy phenomenon despite multiple efforts to standardize the process, yet it only resulted in several ways of tackling the difficult cases, which is of very little help; Ukrainian seems to be an even more complicated case for romanization as it has some features that would either require intricate rules to create accurate spellings, or make greater use of diacritics.
Slavs are pretty fucked. My fav is a name Артём that defies any hope for a consistent translation.
deleted by creator
As someone who is learning Japanese all languages should translate words phonetically
The problem is that English has few phonetic rules. It’s a huge mess
I’m Australian and we don’t pronounce it “tay-let”
That sounds like someone trying to badly imitate Australian accents but having the pronunciation very wrong
I don’t know how you managed to butcher it so badly
All my life I have pronounced it “toy-let” and I grew up in Australia
“tay-let” sounds like some weird portmanteau with “taylor” and “let”
If yer Scruffy, yuh pronounces it ‘terlet.’
Same in the British attempt (which… with a lot of different accents doesn’t make much sense either).
The dingo ate my baby!
Is there not a standardized translation for Ukrainian Cyrillic to English? Every other language seems to manage it.
Also accents don’t change your spelling. We all still spell it toilet.
The best part about standardization is picking the one you want to use the most.
It’s a bit more difficult, since you have to substitute letters and pronunciations that don’t really exist in the Latin alphabet e.g. Я>ya, Щ>shch. For English there is no one correct pronunciation of words so there are regional differences. The the way you would write these sounds drifts even further apart in other languages, in German I would write the two examples like: Я>ja, Щ>schtsch
Not sure if that helps but translating what essentially boils down to different sounds is a bit of a mess.
Average Kanji enjoyer.