Transnistria
Transnistria, or Transdniestria the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, is a unrecognised state that split off from Moldova after the dissolution of the USSR and consists of a narrow strip of land between the river Dniester and the territory of Ukraine. Transnistria has been recognised only by three other non-recognised states: Abkhazia and South Ossetia; the region is considered by the UN to be part of Moldova. Transnistria is designated by the Republic of Moldova as the Transnistria autonomous territorial unit with special legal status, or Stînga Nistrului. After the dissolution of the USSR, tensions between Moldova and the breakaway Transnistrian territory escalated into a military conflict that started in March 1992 and was concluded by a ceasefire in July of the same year; as part of that agreement, a three-party Joint Control Commission supervises the security arrangements in the demilitarised zone, comprising twenty localities on both sides of the river. Although the ceasefire has held, the territory's political status remains unresolved: Transnistria is an unrecognised but de facto independent semi-presidential republic with its own government, military, postal system and vehicle registration.
Its authorities have adopted a constitution, national anthem and coat of arms. It is the only country still using the sickle on its flag. After a 2005 agreement between Moldova and Ukraine, all Transnistrian companies that seek to export goods through the Ukrainian border must be registered with the Moldovan authorities; this agreement was implemented after the European Union Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine took force in 2005. Most Transnistrians have Moldovan citizenship, but many Transnistrians have Russian and Ukrainian citizenship; the main ethnic groups in 2015 were Russians and Ukrainians. Transnistria, South Ossetia, Artsakh are post-Soviet "frozen conflict" zones; these four recognised states maintain friendly relations with each other and form the Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations. The region can be referred to in English as "Trans-Dniestr" or "Transdniestria"; these names are adaptations of the Romanian colloquial name of the region, "Transnistria" meaning "beyond the River Dniester".
The documents of the government of Moldova refer to the region as Stînga Nistrului meaning "Left Bank of the Dniester". According to the Transnistrian authorities, the name of the state is Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic; the short form of this name is Pridnestrovie. "Pridnestrovie" is a transliteration of the Russian "Приднестровье" meaning " by the Dniester". Transnistria became an autonomous political entity in 1924 with the proclamation of the Moldavian ASSR, which included today's Transnistria and an adjacent area around the city of Balta in modern-day Ukraine, but nothing from Bessarabia, which at the time formed part of Romania. One of the reasons for the creation of the Moldavian ASSR was the desire of the Soviet Union at the time to incorporate Bessarabia; the Moldavian SSR, organised by a decision of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 2 August 1940, was formed out of a part of Bessarabia and out of a part of the Moldavian ASSR equivalent to present-day Transnistria. In 1941, after Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union during the Second World War, they defeated the Soviet troops in the region and occupied it.
Romania controlled the entire region between Dniester and Southern Bug rivers, including the city of Odessa as local capital. The Romanian-administered territory – called the Transnistria Governorate – with an area of 44,000 km2 and a population of 2.3 million inhabitants, was divided into 13 counties: Ananiev, Berzovca, Golta, Movilau, Odessa, Ovidiopol, Rîbnița, Tiraspol and Tulcin. This enlarged Transnistria was home to nearly 200,000 Romanian/Moldovan-speaking residents; the Romanian administration of Transnistria attempted to stabilise the situation in the area under Romanian control, implementing a process of Romanianization. During the Romanian occupation of 1941–44, between 150,000 and 250,000 Ukrainian and Romanian Jews were deported to Transnistria. After the Red Army reconquered the area in 1944, Soviet authorities executed, exiled or imprisoned hundreds of the Moldavian SSR inhabitants in the following months on charges of collaboration with the "German-fascist occupiers". A campaign was directed against the rich peasant families, who were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia.
Over the course of two days, 6–7 July 1949, a plan named "Operation South" saw the deportation of over 11,342 families by order of the Moldovian Minister of State Security, Iosif Mordovets. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union
Early Cyrillic alphabet
The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet The objective was to make it possible to have Christian service in Slavic tongue, instead of in Greek, which locals did not understand, to bring Bulgarian subjects closer to the cultural influence of Christianity, the official religion of the Byzantine Empire. It was used by Slavic peoples in South East and Eastern Europe, it was developed in the Preslav Literary School in the capital city of the First Bulgarian Empire in order to write the Old Church Slavonic language. The modern Cyrillic script is still used for some Slavic languages, for East European and Asian languages that were under Russian cultural influence during the 20th century. Among some of the traditionally culturally influential countries using Cyrillic script are Bulgaria, Russia and Ukraine; the earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as ustav, was based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and by letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants not found in Greek.
The Glagolitic alphabet was created by the monk Saint Cyril with the aid of his brother Saint Methodius, around 863. It was an adaptation designed to link the language of their mother, of Slavic origin, their father, the Roman military commander of Thessaloniki, the second most important city of the Byzantine Empire. Cyrillic, on the other hand, was a creation of Cyril's students in the 890s at the Preslav Literary School under Bulgarian Tsar Simeon the Great as a more suitable script for church books, though retaining the original Bulgarian symbols in Glagolitic. An alternative hypothesis proposes that it emerged in the border regions of Greek proselytization to the Slavs before it was codified and adapted by some systematizer among the Slavs. One possibility is that this systematization of Cyrillic was undertaken at the Council of Preslav in 893, when the Old Church Slavonic liturgy was adopted by the Bulgarian Empire; the Cyrillic alphabet was well suited for the writing of Old Church Slavic following a principle of "one letter for one significant sound", with some arbitrary or phonotactically-based exceptions.
This principle is violated by certain vowel letters, which represent plus the vowel if they are not preceded by a consonant. It is violated by a significant failure to distinguish between /ji/ and /jĭ/ orthographically. There was no distinction of capital and lowercase letters, though manuscript letters were rendered larger for emphasis, or in various decorative initial and nameplate forms. Letters served as numerals as well as phonetic signs. Letters without Greek equivalents had no numeral values, whereas one letter, had only a numeric value with no phonetic value. Since its creation, the Cyrillic script has adapted to changes in spoken language and developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages, it has been the subject of political decrees. Variations of the Cyrillic script are used to write languages throughout Eastern Asia; the form of the Russian alphabet underwent a change when Tsar Peter the Great introduced the Civil Script, in contrast to the prevailing Church Typeface, in 1708.
Some letters and breathing marks which were only used for historical reasons were dropped. Medieval letterforms used in typesetting were harmonized with Latin typesetting practices, exchanging medieval forms for Baroque ones, skipping the western European Renaissance developments; the reform subsequently influenced Cyrillic orthographies for most other languages. Today, typesetting standards only remain in use in Church Slavonic. A comprehensive repertoire of early Cyrillic characters is included in the Unicode since version 5.1 standard, which published on April 4, 2008. These characters and their distinctive letterforms are represented in specialized computer fonts for Slavistics. In addition to the basic letters, there were a number of scribal variations, combining ligatures, regionalisms used, all of which varied over time; each letter had a numeric value inherited from the corresponding Greek letter. A titlo over a sequence of letters indicated their use as a number. In numerals, the ones place was to the left of the tens place, the reverse of the order used in modern Arabic numerals.
Thousands are formed using a special symbol, ҂, attached to the lower left corner of the numeral. Many fonts display this symbol incorrectly as being in line with the letters instead of subscripted below and to the left of them. Titlos were used to form abbreviations of nomina sacra. Manuscripts made increasing use of a different style of abbreviation, in which some of the left-out letters were superscripted above the abbreviation and covered with a pokrytie diacritic. Several diacritics, adopted from Polytonic Greek orthography, were used, but were redundant (these may not appea
Romanian Cyrillic alphabet
The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet is the Cyrillic alphabet, used to write the Romanian language before 1860s, when it was replaced by a Latin-based Romanian alphabet. The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was based on the Bulgarian alphabet. Cyrillic remained in occasional use until the 1920s in Bessarabia. From the 1830s until the full adoption of the Latin alphabet, a so-called transitional alphabet was in place, combining Cyrillic and Latin letters, including some of the Latin letters with diacritics that remain in the modern Romanian alphabet; the Romanian Orthodox Church continued using the alphabet in its publications until 1881. The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet is not the same as the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet used in the Moldavian SSR for most of the Soviet era; the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was close to the contemporary version of the Early Cyrillic alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language. Starting with the 1830s and ending with the official adoption of the Latin alphabet, there were no regulations for writing Romanian, various alphabets using Cyrillic and Latin letters, besides the mid-transitional version in the table above, were used, sometimes two or more of them in a single book.
The following table shows some of the many alphabets used in print. According to a document from the 1850s, this is how the Romanian Lord's Prayer looked in Cyrillic script. Transcriptional values correspond to the above table. Early Cyrillic alphabet Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet Romanian alphabet
Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic
The Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, shortened to Moldavian ASSR, was an autonomous republic of the Ukrainian SSR between 12 October 1924 and 2 August 1940, encompassing modern territory of Transnistria. It was an artificial political creation inspired by Moscow in context of reanimation of largely discredited ideas of the "World Revolution". In such manner Bolshevik leadership tried to radicalize pro-Soviet feelings in Bessarabia with a goal to return it in the presence of favorable conditions and creation of geopolitical "place d'armes" to execute a breakthrough in the Balkan direction; the active propagandist of idea in creation of Moldavian autonomy on territory of Ukrainian Transnistria was Russian revolutionary and a native of Bessarabia Grigory Kotovsky. In February of 1924 a memorandum directed to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and signed by Grigory Kotovsky, Bădulescu Alexandru, Pavel Tcacenco, Solomon Tinkelman, Alexandru Nicolau, Alter Zalic, Ion Dic Dicescu, Theodor Diamandescu, Teodor Chioran, Vladimir Popovici, all signatories being Bolshevik activists.
The memorandum emphasized on the fact that on the left bank of Dniester compactly live from 500,000 to 800,000 Moldavians and that creation of Moldavian republic would play a role of powerful political and propaganda factor in solving the "Bessarabian question". Establishing the republic became a matter of dispute. Despite the objections of Soviet commissar of foreign relations Chicherin who argued that the new establishment would only strengthen the position of Romanians towards Bessarabia and able to activate "expansionist claims of Romanian chauvinism", Kremlin launched a campaign to create the autonomy attracting to it Bessarabian refugees and Romanian political emigrants who lived in Moscow and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. On the other hand, Kotovski held that a new republic would spread Communist ideas into neighboring Bessarabia, with a chance that Romania and the entire Balkan region would be revolutionized. For the Soviets the republic was to be a way for winning over Bessarabians of Romania and the first step towards a revolution in Romania.
This purpose is explained in an article of the newspaper Odessa Izvestia in 1924, in which a Russian politician, Vadeev says that "all the oppressed Moldavians from Bessarabia look at the future Republic like at a lighthouse, which spreads the light of freedom and human dignity," as well as in a book published in Moscow, which claimed that "once the economic and cultural growth of Moldavia has begun, aristocracy-led Romania will not be able to maintain its hold on Bessarabia." While the creation of ethnic-based autonomous republics was a general Soviet policy at that time, with the creation of the Moldavian ASSR, the Soviet Union hoped to bolster its claim to Bessarabia. On March 7, 1924, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine recognized a political prudence in creation of autonomy, yet to the final untangling of the question it was decided to return after a careful ascertainment of situation in the region; the debated question was about a form in meeting the interests of Moldovan population.
Whereas in process of carried work it became clear that statistical data on the number of Moldovans presented by the Kotovsky's commission is inflated compared to official, on 18 April 1924 the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine approved to consider creation of the autonomy inappropriate. However, in Moscow this position was ignored; the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee yet went further and about a week on 24 April 1924 it created the VUTsVK Central Commission on affairs of national minorities. Accepted on 29 July, the decision of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party contained categorical indication for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine on allocation of the Moldovan population into a special Autonomous republic as part of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and obligated it to report after a month about the course of the relevant work; the decision about creation of the Autonomous Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic was accepted by the 8th convocation of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee at its 3rd session on 12 October 1924.
The Moldavian ASSR was created from a territory administered as part of the Odessa and Podolia regions of Ukraine. It accounted for 2 % of the population of the Ukrainian SSR at the time; the oblast had four districts, all of them having a Moldavian majority: Rîbnița – 48,748 inhabitants, of which 25,387 Moldavians – 52% Dubăsari – 57,371 inhabitants, of which 33,600 Moldavians- 58% Tiraspol – entirely Moldavians Ananyiv – 45,545 inhabitants, of which 24,249 Moldavians- 53%On 8 October 1924 the oblast was elevated to the status of autonomous republic and included several other territories, including some with little Moldavian population, such as the Balta district, which had only 2.52% Moldavians. The official capital was proclaimed the "temporarily occupied city of Kishinev". Meanwhile, a provisional capital was established in Balta and moved to Tiraspol in 1929, where it remained until the MASSR was integrated into the newly created Mo
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many different local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Eucleidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version, still used to write Greek today; these twenty-four letters are: Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, Ω ω. The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek had only a single form of each letter. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage, because the pronunciation of Greek has changed between the fifth century BC and today.
Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics and other fields. In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was near-phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages. Examples Notes Among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek; the correspondences are as follows: Among the vowel symbols, Modern Greek sound values reflect the radical simplification of the vowel system of post-classical Greek, merging multiple distinct vowel phonemes into a much smaller number.
This leads to several groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the historical spellings in most of these cases; as a consequence, the spellings of words in Modern Greek are not predictable from the pronunciation alone, while the reverse mapping, from spelling to pronunciation, is regular and predictable. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers: Modern Greek speakers use the same, modern symbol–sound mappings in reading Greek of all historical stages. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components. Among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the four mentioned above, there is ⟨ηι, ωι⟩, ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/; the Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩ and ⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced, in Modern Greek.
In some environments, they are devoiced to, respectively. The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩ stand for and respectively. In addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal. In analogy to ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩, ⟨γκ⟩ is used to stand for. There are the combinations ⟨γχ⟩ and ⟨γξ⟩. In the polytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek, the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either the acute accent, the grave accent, or the circumflex accent; these signs were designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. By the time their use became conventional and obligatory in Greek writing, in late antiquity, pitch accent was evolving into a single stress accent, thus the three signs have not corresponded to a phonological distinction in actual speech since. In addition to the accent marks, every word-initial vowel must carry either of two so-called "breathing marks": the rough breathing, marking an /h/ sound at the beginning of a word, or the smooth breathing, marking its absence.
The letter rho, although not a vowel carries a rough breathing in word-initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transliteration rrh; the vowel letters ⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the so-called iota subscript, which has the shape of a small vertical stroke or a miniature ⟨ι⟩ below the letter. This iota represents the former offglide of what were long diphthongs, ⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩, which became monophthongized during antiquity. Another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis; this system of diacritics was first developed by the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, who worked at the Musaeum in Alexandria during the third century BC. Aristophanes of Byzantium was the first to divide poems into lines, rather than writing them like prose, introduced a series of signs for textual criticism. In 1982, a new, simplif
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were centralized; the country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Minsk, Alma-Ata, Novosibirsk, it spanned over 10,000 kilometres east to west across 11 time zones, over 7,200 kilometres north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, steppes and mountains; the Soviet Union had its roots in the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government which had replaced Tsar Nicholas II during World War I. In 1922, the Soviet Union was formed by a treaty which legalized the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian and Byelorussian republics that had occurred from 1918. Following Lenin's death in 1924 and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s.
Stalin committed the state's ideology to Marxism–Leninism and constructed a command economy which led to a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization. During his rule, political paranoia fermented and the Great Purge removed Stalin's opponents within and outside of the party via arbitrary arrests and persecutions of many people, resulting in at least 600,000 deaths. In 1933, a major famine struck the country. Before the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviets signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, after which the USSR invaded Poland on 17 September 1939. In June 1941, Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theatre of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk; the territories overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Soviet Union.
The post-war division of Europe into capitalist and communist halves would lead to increased tensions with the United States-led Western Bloc, known as the Cold War. Stalin died in 1953 and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin and began the de-Stalinization; the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred during Khrushchev's rule, among the many factors that led to his downfall in 1964. In the early 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed with the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. In 1985, the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost and perestroika, which caused political instability. In 1989, Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist governments; as part of an attempt to prevent the country's dissolution due to rising nationalist and separatist movements, a referendum was held in March 1991, boycotted by some republics, that resulted in a majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the union as a renewed federation.
Gorbachev's power was diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin's high-profile role in facing down a coup d'état attempted by Communist Party hardliners. In late 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union met and formally dissolved the Soviet Union; the remaining 12 constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states, with the Russian Federation—formerly the Russian SFSR—assuming the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and being recognized as the successor state. The Soviet Union was a powerhouse of many significant technological achievements and innovations of the 20th century, including the world's first human-made satellite, the first humans in space and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus; the country had the largest standing military in the world. The Soviet Union was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states and possessed the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, it was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Federation of Trade Unions and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.
The word "Soviet" is derived from a Russian word сове́т meaning council, advice, harmony and all deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of vět-iti, related to Slavic věst, English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or", or the Dutch weten. The word sovietnik means "councillor". A number of organizations in Russian history were called "council". For example, in the Russian Empire the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905. During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union, which he named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. Stalin resisted the proposal, but accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name of the newly proposed sta
Esperanto orthography
Esperanto is written in a Latin-script alphabet of twenty-eight letters, with upper and lower case. This is supplemented by punctuation marks and by various logograms, such as the numerals 0–9, currency signs such as $, mathematical symbols. Twenty-two of the letters are identical in form to letters of the English alphabet; the remaining six have diacritic marks, ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. In handwritten Esperanto, the diacritics pose no problem. However, since they do not appear on standard alphanumeric keyboards, various alternative methods have been devised for representing them in printed and typed text; the original method was a set of digraphs now known as the "h-system", but with the rise of computer word processing, the so-called "x-system" has become popular. These systems are described below. However, with the advent of Unicode, the need for such work-arounds has lessened; the letters have the sound values of the IPA, with the exception of c and the circumflex letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. J transcribes two sounds and vocalic.
There is a nearly one-to-one correspondence of letter to sound. Beside the dual use of ⟨j⟩, significant exceptions are: voicing assimilation, as in the sequence kz of ekzemple, pronounced /ɡz/ place assimilation, as in n, pronounced before g and kNon-Esperantized names are given an Esperanto approximation of their original pronunciation, at least by speakers without command of the original language. Hard ⟨c⟩ is read as k, ⟨qu⟩ as kv, ⟨w⟩ as v, ⟨x⟩ as ks, ⟨y⟩ as j if a consonant, or as i if a vowel; the English digraph ⟨th⟩ is read as t. When there is no close equivalent, the difficult sounds may be given the Esperanto values of the letters in the orthography or roman transcription, accommodating the constraints of Esperanto phonology. So, for example, Winchester is pronounced Vinĉester /vint͡ʃester/, as Esperanto has no w. Changzhou becomes Ĉanĝo /t͡ʃand͡ʒo/, as Esperanto has no ng or ou sound. There are no strict rules, however; the original stress may be kept. The script resembles Western Slavic Latin alphabets but uses circumflexes instead of carons for the letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ.
The non-Slavic bases of the letters ĝ and ĵ, rather than Slavic dž and ž, help preserve the printed appearance of Latinate and Germanic vocabulary such as ĝenerala "general" and ĵurnalo "journal". The letter v stands for either w of other languages; the letter ŭ of the diphthongs aŭ and eŭ resemble the Belarusian Łacinka alphabet. Geographic names diverge from English for the English x, w, qu and gu, as in Vaŝingtono "Washington, D. C.", Meksiko "Mexico", or Gvatemalo "Guatemala". Other spelling differences appear when Esperanto spelling is based on the pronunciation of English names which have undergone the Great Vowel Shift, as in Brajtono for Brighton. Zamenhof tacked an -o onto each consonant to create the name of the letter, with the vowels representing themselves: a, bo, co, ĉo, do, e, fo, etc; the diacritics are mentioned overtly. For instance, ĉ may be called ĉo ĉapela or co ĉapela, from ĉapelo, ŭ may be called ŭo luneta or u luneta, from luno plus the diminutive -et-; this is the only system, accepted and in practical use.
The letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet not found in the Esperanto alphabet have distinct names, much as letters of the Greek alphabet do. ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩ are kuo, ipsilono. However, while this is fine for initialisms such as ktp for etc. it can be problematic when spelling out names. For example, several consonantal distinctions are difficult for many nationalities, who rely on the fact that Esperanto uses these sounds to distinguish words, thus the pairs of letter names ĵo–ĝo, ĥo–ho, co–ĉo, lo–ro, ŭo–vo are problematic. In addition, over a noisy telephone connection it becomes apparent that voicing distinctions can be difficult to make out: noise confounds the pairs po–bo, to–do, ĉo–ĝo, ko–go, fo–vo, so–zo, ŝo–ĵo, as well as the nasals mo–no. There have been several proposals to resolve this problem. Gaston Waringhien proposed changing the vowel of voiced obstruents to a, so that at least voicing is not problematic. Changed to a are h, n, r, distinguishing them from ĥ, m, l; the result is the most common alternative in use: a, ba, co, ĉo, da, e, fo, ga, ĝa, ha, ĥo, i, jo, ĵa, ko, lo, mo, na, o, po, ra, so, ŝo, to, u, ŭo, va, zaHowever, this still requires overt mention of the diacritics, so does not reliably distinguish ba–va, co–so, ĉo–ŝo, or ĝa–ĵa.
The proposal closest to international norms that clarifies all the above distinctions is a modification of a proposal by Kálmán Kalocsay. As with Zamenhof, vowels stand for themselves, but it follows the international standard of placing vowel e after a consonant by default, but before sonorants and voiceless fricatives; the vowel a is used for ⟨h⟩ and the voiceless plosives ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, ⟨k⟩, after the international names ha for ⟨h⟩ and ka for ⟨k⟩. The letter ⟨v⟩ has the i vowel of ĵi, distinguishing it from ⟨b⟩
