Cyrillic Index for Herbs and Spices

This is a multi­lingual index which allows to identify about 120 herbs and spices by names written in Cyrillic script. Supported languages that use the Cyrillic script natively are Slavonic languages from Eastern Europe (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian; Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian) and Kazakh; Mongolian and the Iranian languages (Tajik, Ossetic), however, is only in β stage at best. To offer compatibility to Soviet era literature, I also offer historic Cyrillic writings for spice names in Azeri, Uzbek and Turkmen.

The collating sequence is different in different languages. It is, thus, not possible to sort a multilingual index in a way to meet expectations of speakers of all languages involved. The way how the words are sorted here is a compromise between different conventions. Please refer to the side bar for the exact sequence.

The trans­literation scheme used here is bijective and mostly inspired by ISO 9 transliteration, although I deviated from that scheme occasionally for better internal consistency and to extend it to other languages.

• I consistently use the the circumflex accent to denote palatalized vowels (ЯЄЇЁЮ =âêîôû), while ISO-9 prescribes diaresis for some cases. Note that Е is unpalatalized in all languages except Russian, and therefore redered e here.

• Cyrillic Х is variously transliterated as h, kh or x; even the ISO 9 standard has no stable opinion about that. My choice is ḫ which is widely used in the transliteration of Georgian, Armenian and Arabic for similar sounds.

• The representation of the palatal consonants in Serbian and Macedonian is somewhat problematic. I wanted to transliterate them in a consistent way, and chose the cedilla as a common diacritic: (ЂЃЉЊЌЋ = ḑģļņķţ). In the common romanization of Serbian, Ђ and Ћ are represented as đ and ć, respectively (as in Croatian), and I also use the same character set for Macedonian.

• For the Altaic languages written in Cyrillic script, I aimed at maximum similarity to modern Turkish or Azeri spelling. Therefore, I use diaresis for the umlaut vowels (ӘӨҮ=äöü) as in Turkish and represent Қ by q as in romanized Kazakh. Nevertheless, Roman Azeri spelling is somewhat different from what is shown here.

Some Cyrillic letters (асеіјорѕху) look similar, or almost identical, to Latin lowercase letters (aceijopsxy), although their pronunciation may be very different. These letters pose significant security riscs in the context of Internationalized Domain Names.

Please note that the transliteration used here reflects the writing in the native Cyrillic alphabet exactly; therefore, it does not accurate represent the actual pronunciation. For example, the Cyrillic letter г (here transliterated as g) is pronounced g as in get in Russian, but a kind of voiced h as in house in Ukrainian. The indiviual spice articles use a transcription which is better suited as a guide to pronunciation. The differences between transliteration and transcription may be illustrated using the Russian and Ukrainian word for bitter:

Language	Russian	Ukrainian
Cyrillic	горький	гіркий
Transliteration	gor’kij	gìrkij
Transcription	gorkij	hirkyj
Pronunciation	gorki	heerky

   

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• Begin of page
• German page (Deutsch)
• Table of Contents
• Overview
• Introduction
• Alphabetic Index
• Botanic Index
• Geographic Index
• Spice Mixture Index
• Morphological Index

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Report problems and suggestions to Gernot Katzer
(treabgxngmre)

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