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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's 'borsjtsj'. No idea why. Presumably it's the closest approximation of that phoneme in Dutch, but it seems unlikely that anyone trying to pronounce the Dutch transliteration would get anywhere close to the Russian original.

Borsjt or possibly even borsj would probably be better.

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There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it.

People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true:

    mission
    contrition
    sure

And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophonic reduction of the sound sequence /sj/. It's not a coincidence that "sj" is the standard Dutch spelling of the same sound. The English standard orthographical equivalent, "borshch", is less accurate than the Dutch is.

It's very interesting to compare people's view of /ʃ/ with /ʒ/, another perfectly normal native English phoneme, but one that most people insist is foreign and hard to pronounce. The only difference I see is that a standard American education covers the idea that /ʃ/ is a real sound and should be spelled "sh", while /ʒ/ is generally not mentioned. But of course the existence of the sound is not actually related to whether your teacher mentioned it in elementary school.

I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?

Borscht is also the name that I know (though as an American, I can't speak to the UK). "Borshch" is the orthographical equivalent to Russian Борщ and Dutch borsjtsj.

I don't think so. I'm British and know it as "borscht"; I've never (consciously) seen "borshch" until now.

the comment was explaining which spelling would most closely resemble the original russian pronunciation. as some of the sister comments explain, borscht is the yiddish pronunciation

Borscht with a T is the Yiddish pronunciation, unlike Russian which drops the T. It's a more common spelling in areas that historically had a larger Eastern European Jewish population (like the US, where the "borscht" spelling extended out from New York).

Borscht is the pronunciation in Bulgarian of Борщ.

To add even more confusion, in my sort-of Philly accent, street is pronounced [ˈʃtɹit].

My uneducated guess on /ʒ/ is that /dʒ/ is the most common way of encountering it, so people aren't comfortable separating it out, even though it's still common. It probably doesn't help that the usual transcription is zh which basically doesn't exist in native English words.

> It probably doesn't help that the usual transcription is zh which basically doesn't exist in native English words.

Depends what you mean by "the usual transcription". The usual spelling in English is "s" followed by i or u. (As in "usual" / "measure" / "vision" / etc. etc. etc. etc.) "Zh" is the standard transcription for Russian. The same sound in Chinese is today normally transcribed "r", because that is the letter assigned to it by China's official Romanized orthography, Hanyu pinyin[1]. In Wade-Giles, it was transcribed "j".

[1] The pinyin "r" (and the Wade-Giles "j") can represent a sound anywhere along the continuum between what an English speaker would perceive as the two distinct sounds /ʒ/ and /ɹ/. (The "s" and the "r" in "measure".)

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