I finally found a book describing the official rules for transcribing Cyrillic to Slovak language. This solves my original problem that inspired this search, and is probably useless for you if you don’t speak Slovak.
The rules are straightforward for most letters, only for the “й”-related letters (“е”, “ё”, “и”, “ю”, “я”) we distinguish situations whether the given character is:
at the beginning of a word, or following a hard symbol;
following a soft symbol;
following a vowel;
following one of: “ж”, “ч”, “ш”, “щ”;
following a different consonant.
For example, “е” would be transcribed as “je”, “ie”, “je”, “e”, “e” respectively; “ё” would be transcribed as “jo”, “jo”, “jo”, “o”, “io” respectively. I believe this follows the logic of Russian language (rather than Slovak), so I would expect similar rules when transcribing to other languages.
For Ukrainian letters different from Russian, the rules are much simpler: “є” is always “je”, “і” is always “i”, and “ї” is always “ji”. I have no idea whether this is because of intrinsic differences with regards to given letters, or because the authors of these rules did not take Ukrainian language equally seriously. (To avoid misunderstanding, the last sentence was not meant as a sarcasm. Russian “и” is an equivalent of both Ukrainian “і” and “ї”, so it would make sense if the rules for the former are more complicated than for the latter.)
I finally found a book describing the official rules for transcribing Cyrillic to Slovak language.
I remember that there are sometimes different official rules for transcription depending on the language. The German Wikipedia for example makes often a point of transcribing names according to German rules even if many times the English transcription of a name gets used more.
If a German-speaking person wants to read some words transcribed from Russian, why should the English rules be used in the process at all? It’s not like the Russian language is somehow inherently English-like. (Arguably, German is actually a bit closer to Russian, having a bit more of the “one sound—one letter” correspondence.)
But then it is annoying when that German person speaks English, and needs to remember both transcriptions, or to be able to convert between them on the spot.
Essentially, there is no way to transcribe Russian “to Latin script”, because there is no consensus how to use the Latin script among those who use it. (I have no idea what is the situation with Cyrillic. It seems much more unified for Slavic languages, but it’s optimized for them. No idea how e.g. Mongols tweak it.)
If German journalists read something in English media, they often copy over the name from English media without the journalist thinking about what the proper transcription in German happens to be.
I finally found a book describing the official rules for transcribing Cyrillic to Slovak language. This solves my original problem that inspired this search, and is probably useless for you if you don’t speak Slovak.
The rules are straightforward for most letters, only for the “й”-related letters (“е”, “ё”, “и”, “ю”, “я”) we distinguish situations whether the given character is:
at the beginning of a word, or following a hard symbol;
following a soft symbol;
following a vowel;
following one of: “ж”, “ч”, “ш”, “щ”;
following a different consonant.
For example, “е” would be transcribed as “je”, “ie”, “je”, “e”, “e” respectively; “ё” would be transcribed as “jo”, “jo”, “jo”, “o”, “io” respectively. I believe this follows the logic of Russian language (rather than Slovak), so I would expect similar rules when transcribing to other languages.
For Ukrainian letters different from Russian, the rules are much simpler: “є” is always “je”, “і” is always “i”, and “ї” is always “ji”. I have no idea whether this is because of intrinsic differences with regards to given letters, or because the authors of these rules did not take Ukrainian language equally seriously. (To avoid misunderstanding, the last sentence was not meant as a sarcasm. Russian “и” is an equivalent of both Ukrainian “і” and “ї”, so it would make sense if the rules for the former are more complicated than for the latter.)
I remember that there are sometimes different official rules for transcription depending on the language. The German Wikipedia for example makes often a point of transcribing names according to German rules even if many times the English transcription of a name gets used more.
If a German-speaking person wants to read some words transcribed from Russian, why should the English rules be used in the process at all? It’s not like the Russian language is somehow inherently English-like. (Arguably, German is actually a bit closer to Russian, having a bit more of the “one sound—one letter” correspondence.)
But then it is annoying when that German person speaks English, and needs to remember both transcriptions, or to be able to convert between them on the spot.
Essentially, there is no way to transcribe Russian “to Latin script”, because there is no consensus how to use the Latin script among those who use it. (I have no idea what is the situation with Cyrillic. It seems much more unified for Slavic languages, but it’s optimized for them. No idea how e.g. Mongols tweak it.)
If German journalists read something in English media, they often copy over the name from English media without the journalist thinking about what the proper transcription in German happens to be.