Standart/Shtandart

[Sarushka]

Can anyone tell me why the name of NII's yacht is conventionally rendered as "Standart" in American English when the cyrillic spelling should in fact be correctly transliterated as "Shtandart"?

I'm working on corrections for my novel on OTMA, and this issue is giving me fits. I've translated everything else from the cyrillic literally and can't decide what to do about Standart/Shtandart. For example, when I do a Google search on "Shtandart" the majority of hits are for the 1703 frigate of the Baltic fleet, not NII's yacht. Seems like that would be confusing to readers who go looking for more information on the IF...

[Mike]

The Standart was the name under which the ship was registered at Lloyd's. The Russian word Штандартъ (military flag) derives from the word Standarte as pronounced in German.

[Constantinople]

Shtandart is what I think it should be.  It was named after Peter the Great's yacht so they shoulld have the same pronounciation.

[Douglas]

If one is writing for the English speaking part of the world it should be Standart. [English is certainly the international language today.]

The name is derived from the flag.  English speaking people generally shy away from words that sound to Germanic.  Therefore, the yacht has come to be known as Standart, which sounds more acceptable to most English speaking people.  The IF usually spoke English among themselves.  The IF usually stayed away from words that sounded too German for obvious reason.  Shtandart is  too German sounding.

When in doubt, the International Lloyds Registration designation is the correct name to be followed, which lists the yacht as the Standart.

Main Entry: Standard
Function: noun
Date: 12th century
1 : a conspicuous object (as a banner) formerly carried at the top of a pole and used to mark a rallying point especially in battle or to serve as an emblem

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

I like the Finnish way of transliterating Cyrillic ш as š and ч as č. Thus it was the Štandart which cruised the Finnish fjords.

(The digraph sh doesn't exist in Finnish and the Scandinavian languages. Finnish also lacks ch and has a very simple consonant system compared to both its eastern, northern and western neighbours. Thus many monolingual Finns, like the inhabitants of Virolahti were probably unable /not likely to pronounce it as anything else than /standart/, while Svedophone Finlanders like Alexander III's fishing buddy Serafina "Kejsar-Fina" Lindblad on Högsåra may have said /shtandart/.)

Out of Norwegian patriotism I have installed the North Sami alphabet on my Windows language bar, so I can easily write š. :-)