ON TRANSLITERATION OF WORDS CONTAINED “H” FROM ENGLISH TO UKRAINIAN (EXPERIMENTAL PHONETIC STUDY)

Abstract

The study is devoted to the issue of the word transliteration from English in to Ukrainian. In particular, it is about words containing the character “h”. It must be rendered with the cyrillic letter “г” according to spelling rules of Ukrainian (Hollywood = Голівуд, hostel = гостел, Halloween =Гелловін). However, in society there is a discussion that promotes the idea that theletter “h” is correctly transliterated with “x”, because the English voiced glottal fricative consonant [h] is an equivalent to the Ukrainian voiceless velar fricative [х], but not to Ukrainian voiceless glottal fricative [ɦ ]. The aim of this study is to test this assumption. As a result of implemented two different experiments (sound spectral analysis and auditory perception analysis) it was found that English [h] is more like a Ukrainian [ɦ] according to acoustic characteristics and more like a Ukrainian [х] according to perception (hearing) of auditors.

Keywords

• дзвінкий гортанний фрикативний звук [ɦ]
• глухий гортанний фрикативний звук [h]
• глухий задньоязиковий фрикативний звук [х]
• приголосні
• правопис української мови
• транслітерація
• фонетика