Two of the most difficult aspects of translating and editing this volume have been the multiplicity of transcription systems for Russian and its corollary, the lack of any broadly recognized standard for rendering Russian terms and names in Roman letters. In general, I have attempted to adhere to the transcription system recommended by my Russian colleagues, but this has been complicated by the fact that there are many terms widely recognized in English scholarly literature that take other forms in more strict transliterations (e. g., darya [instead of dar’ya], Tripolye [instead of Tripol’e], Afanasievo [instead of Afana-s’evo], and so forth). In such cases, I have usually stayed with the conventional English spelling to avoid confusing readers who are already familiar with the latter. For this volume, we have adopted a combination of the systems of the Library of Congress, the U. S. Board on Geographic Names, and the Tozzer Library at Harvard University. Our main purposes in doing so have been to make our transliterations look and sound natural to English-speaking readers, and to avoid cumbersome diacriticals. In the case of well-established spellings for proper nouns (personal and place names) and technical terms, we have generally followed custom rather than strict adherence to any set of rules.
Another, still more challenging, set of transcriptional problems consists of names and terms from Chinese, Uyghur, and other languages that have been filtered through Russian. Russian (i. e.. Cyrillic) transcriptions of Chinese, for example, treat Sinitic phonemes differently than does English, so it is often hard to determine the correct transcription in English unless one knows for sure the precise name, place, or term that is specified in the Russian. Because I am acquainted with most of the sites and cultures referred to by Kuzmina, I was usually able to recognize the doubly disguised transcriptions she used. Occasionally, however, I was not entirely certain of the original form of the
Chinese, Uyghur, and other names and terms. In such cases, I simply rendered the Cyrillic transcriptions in Roman letters.
Likewise, until recently, there were many different systems for transcribing the sounds of Chinese characters in Roman letters (French, German, English, etc.). When these transcriptions are converted into Cyrillic, it is sometimes difficult to recover the original Modern Standard Mandarin sounds they are intended to represent. As much as possible, however, we have endeavored to convey the sounds of Chinese characters in the official romanization of the Peoples’ Republic of China known as Hahyu Pinyin.
Similar problems exist with the conversion of Cyrillic transcriptions of Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Turkic names and terms into Roman letters. To the extent that it is feasible, we have tried to present these names and terms in the forms in which they are best known in English.
World History
