Note on transliteration

Transliteration is a thorny business in Rus’ and East Slavic studies. Generally, Russian and Western scholars romanise the Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic languages using Russian.  Even so, authors often make independent stylistic choices. Below, I outline my own approach to transliterations for this project.

Personal and place names are transliterated from Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian according to where they were geographically located. For example, Veliky Novgorod, Kyiv (not Kiev), and Mscislaŭ (not Mstislavl’).

Names in the birchbark letters are romanised from Old East Slavic (and its Old Novgorodian dialect, where applicable). The Library of Congress guidelines for Church Slavonic were considered here, although Old East Slavic was the vernacular.  Therefore, the Cyrillic character ‘ь’ is transliterated with an apostrophe, and ‘ъ’ with ”. I do not use diacritic marks. ‘Ч’, for example, is rendered as ‘ch’ and not ‘č’, and the yat sign (ѣ) as ‘e’ and not the more accurate ‘ĕ’, contrary to the Library of Congress guidelines. This is to make my transliterations more consistent and accessible. I use ‘y’, not ‘i’, when transcribing the yers (for example, ‘ya’ and ‘yu’ instead of ‘ia’ and ‘iu’).  Finally, I do not romanise the Old Slavonic nasal sign ѧ (romanised as ę), which is found in Old East Slavic birchbarks and chronicles, as a nasal. Unlike Polish, the (Old) East Slavic languages did not retain the nasals. There is reason to believe in Old East Slavic, ѧ represented a non-nasal sound such as ‘ya’ which is the sound for modern Russ., Ukr., Bela., ‘я’.