• Magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh
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      8 months ago

      Side note, this is also the French spelling of Putin. So you can eat Poutine while being mad at Poutine (I’ll let you guess which is which, unless you’re a cannibal then everything goes TBF).

        • 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).