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Chukotsk Or Chukchi 244 NOTES the sea. An arm of the same sound ex- plicated situations in every field of tended northwestward into the Mierch- endeavour. To some cartographers and ing Lake depression. gazetteer writersthe transposition of The west coast of the peninsula in the Russian geographical names into Eng- vicinity of Lefroy Bay differed only lish may seem a subject well suited for slightly from its present configuration. an arbitrary rule of thumb; but is it? A comparatively narrow coastal belt Let us consider an example. was submerged andarms of the sea Inthe remotenortheast corner of extended a few miles up the valleys of Asia there is a projection of land of the the main west-flowing rivers. Rae Isth- kind that is commonly classed asa mus and the northshore of Repulse Bay peninsula. The co-ordinates, according were submerged and a broad strait, 20 to Gazetteer No. 42, United States Board miles wide, connected the present Com- of Geographical Names, are 66’00’N. mittee Bay and Repulse Bay. and 174”OO’W. In common practice, Table 1 gives the precise location and however, it would be cumbersome to criteria used inthe determination of refer to the homeland of the Chukchi the postglacial marine limit at thirteen as“Peninsula 66’00’N. and 174”OO’W.” places in southern Melville Peninsula. no matter how exact the description or VICTORW. SIM how bleak the country may be. Ob- viously, we must have a proper name, a designation less artificial, mathematical, ‘Sim, Victor W. Maximum postglacial 1960. and abstract than that provided by the marine submergencein northern Melville generic name and geographical co- Peninsula. Arctic 13:178-93. ordinates, but it must also be geograph- ZBurns, C. A.,and A. E. Wilson, 1952. ically informative and linguistically Geologicalnotes on localities in James sound, i.e., etymologically correctand Bay, Hudson Bay and Foxe Basin visited as far as possible short and euphonic. during an explorationcruise, 1949; in- Obviously the generic part of the name, cludinglists of collectedfossils. Geol. in this case “Peninsula”, should be Surv. Can. Pap. 52-25, 17 pp. intelligible to the general public, with- Wathiassen, Therkel. 1933. Contributions out requiring consultation of a foreign to the geography of BaffinLand and language dictionary. MelvillePeninsula. Fifth Thule Exped., However, Gazetteer No. 42 andthe 1921-24, Rept. Vol. 1, No. 3, 102pp. U.S. government maps presentas the 4Bird, J. B. 1953. SouthamptonIsland. “approved” version Chukotskiy Poluos- GeographicalBranch, Mem. 1, Ottawa: trov. Now, a Russian-speaking person Queen’s Printer, 84 pp. familiar with the Latin alphabet, or an English-speaking person knowing Rus- sian, would immediately know that an CHUKOTSK OR CHUKCHI: SOME expedition to Chukotskiy Poluostrov THOUGHTSON THE TRANSPO- would not be an expedition to the moon, SITION OF SOVIET GEOGRAPH- butfor that matter neither would be ICAL NAMES dismayed if the original Cyrillic alpha- Whether G. E. Moore, the great com- bet had been used. On the other hand, mon-sense philosopher of our time, the reader who has not had the benefit was right in reviving and defending the of training in theRussian language is in old philosophic contention that purely no way enlightened by the word Poluos- externalrelations do notexist may trov, nor has he any way of knowing seem beside the point to the man of this thatthe jaw-breaking Chukotskiy is pragmatic age, butsurely every one merely the Russian adjectival form of will agree that the problems presented Chukchi, the name of the tribe inhabit- by relations generally admit much less ing the region. of superficial blanket solutions than we The reason for the current trend to- are apt to believe, faced as we are with wards indiscriminate transliteration of growing numbers of increasingly com- Soviet geographical names is not far to NOTES 245 seek. It is the simplest way to avoid the (LakeHuron, Mohawk River)there problems of adaptation, and at the same can be no conceivable reason for not time enables all those who may now following the same principle here and have aneed to know the Russian version using the linguistically correct forms of the names to avoid learning the 32 Chukchi Peninsula, Chukchi Sea, Cape letters of the Cyrillic alphabet - at the Chukchi, etc. For these are exact Eng- price of a minor distortion and some lish counterparts to the Russian Chu- uncertainty in spelling and pronuncia- kotskiy Poluostrov, Chukotskoe More, tion. By the same token it is also the Chukotskiy Mys. It is sureLy a black crudest manner of transposition. It lit- mark against the earth sciences that as erally deprives the English language of yet there is no authoritative large-scale a galaxy of geographical names for a map of Eurasia on which students can vast and increasingly important part of readily locate places and features with- the earth. It is a way of dodging an out recourse to inflected Russian lan- issue instead of facing it. guage forms. Nevertheless, unless some The obvious conclusion is thatthe appropyiate action is taken now, there gap in English map making ought to be is realdanger that the present trend, filled, rather than that readers of geo- based primarily on rather narrow mili- graphical literature should be required tary strategic considerations, will pre- to accept such bilingual combinations vail, leaving students of geography in as “Reka Yana is formed by the conflu- future a heritage of unnecessarily ob- ence of Reka Dulgalakh and Reka scure and difficult forms. Sartang, which take their origin in the In preparing the translation of a Rus- Verkhoyanskiy Khrebet; it flows to the sian journal1 the authors tried to trans- Yanskiy Zaliv in the More Laptevykh, pose Soviet geographical names on the one of the outlying seas of the Severnyy basis of sound linguistic principles. Be- Ledovityy Okean”. Transliterationhas fore making a decision good precedents its uses, but it must not be expected to in English cartography weresought. The solve all problems. The differences of transposition pattern that has evolved rendering due to choice of translitera- in our practice, with some examples of tion system are, of course, aseparate its application, may be of interest to all issue and cannot be dealt with here. who have to dealwith Soviet geographi- cal names in English. There havebeen a few attempts, some is quite sim- ill-advised and others very sound but Our primary contention not systematic, to anglicize Russian geo- ple : wherever the aims of clear geo- graphical identification will permit, graphical names. established and linguistically correct The peninsula mentioned above has anglicized names and derivativesin their onoccasion been referred to asChu- shortest form should be preferred over kotski Peninsula, after thepattern of transliterated Russian forms. Polish surnames, which is rather like Thus we write Ural Mountains and having an “Eskimson Point” instead of not Ural’skie Gory or Ural’skie Moun- Eskimo Point. At other times the name tains; Moscow Oblast and not Moskov- has been truncated to Chukotsk Penin- skaya Oblast’ or Moskva Oblast, but sula, whichwould suggest that it namedis also not Moscow Region, retaining the after a town of Chukotsk, which does Russian name for the Soviet adminis- not even exist (cf. “Eskiville”, “Eskiton trative unit (asalso Raion, Krai, Okrug) Point”). As a further illustration of the to avoid any confusion; Archangel and confusion, note the following variants not Arkhangel’sk; Chita Oblast not from Webster’s Geographical Diction- Chitinskaya Oblast, especially since this ary (Merriam Co., 1960): Chuckchee adjectival form can hardly be located on (Chukchi)Sea, Chukot National Dis- any map, whereas the city of Chita (not trict,Chukotski (Chukot) Peninsula, Chitinsk), which is the administrative Chukotskoe More.Now, since English centre of the Oblast, appears on prac- regularly applies tribal names in un- tically everymap; also Krasnoyarsk inflected form to geographical features Krai, etc. On the other hand we write 246 NOTES Primorskii Kraiand do not use Maritime The question of non-Russian geo- Territory or Primorsk Krai, since the graphical names within the territory of first would not be sufficiently precise, the USSR has been dealtwith by whereasthe second would suggest a Uustalu2. Where these names were non-existent town of “Primorsk”. originally written in the Latin alphabet a strange distortion often results from Where the name of a feature consists double transliteration. In such instances of two parts the first of which is an ad- the original spelling is definitely pref- jective expressing a geographical posi- erable: Cesis (not Tsesis), Haljala (not tion the adjective is best left in Russian, Khalyala), Haapsalu (notKhaapsalu), both for reasons of clarity and in order Vilnius (not Vil’no), etc. not to make the English version of pro- per names too much unlike the Russian. Names that have been derived from Thus it is Verkhnyaya Tunguska River, other languages using the Cyrillic al- ratherthan Upper TunguskaRiver, phabet and are relatively well-known Severnaya Dvina River,rather than in western cartography in their original Northern Dvina River, etc. These are form might be better rendered closer to relatively straightforward examples. the original, especially where the origi- nal ismore readily adaptable to English. A special problem arises in connec- For example Bila Tserkva (“White tion with thevarious derivatives of Church” in Ukrainian), which in Rus- “Yana”, the name of one of the larger sian is Belaya Tserkov’, Kharkov(or rivers of Siberia. An important town on Kharkiv, but not Khar’kov), etc. the upper reaches of this river is quite naturally called Verkhoyansk (the pre- On the other hand,if the name derives fix “verkho-”or “verkhne-” means from a native tribal dialect there would upper) and here a straight transliter- be little advantage in trying to re-es- ation is the only possible solution.
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