Proper Names
Q. Can you provide more detail on the rules governing the use of short-form given names, nicknames, or pseudonyms, etc.? I am interested particularly in different-language versions of a first name—
Jerzy (Yuri) Onuch Mary (Marichka) Renko St. Nicholas (Mykola)
—or formal vs. informal names—
Lubomyr (Lu) Pastenko Ramon (Ray) Maryn
It seems more logical to use parentheses than quotation marks, except perhaps in the case of pseudonyms or appellations. And is there a special rule when the person prefers to use their second given name rather than their first? Sometimes I see an initial given for the first name, e.g., P. (Roman) Lischynsky. For what it’s worth, the transliteration table you show, which favors the US Geographical Association standard, does not correspond to the (more widespread and, in my opinion, more authoritative) US Library of Congress standard, which can be found at http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/lccyr.html. Moreover, the table you show provides an acceptable transliteration form only from Russian; other Cyrillic-using languages (e.g., Belarusian, Ukrainian) would err in applying this standard (though probably unconsciously, given the Russian hegemony—which you, unfortunately, are helping to perpetrate).
A. It is fine to put alternative spellings of a given name in parentheses. Nicknames should be put in quotation marks:
George Herman “Babe” Ruth
Thelma Catherine Ryan “Pat” Nixon
I think you are right to put the informal name in parentheses, however. An informal name is not quite a nickname; it is in a sense an alternative way of writing the formal name—roughly analogous to writing the name in another language.
As for initials, one should generally write a name the way it would be used in a given context. So one would write F. Scott Fitzgerald when talking about his books, because that’s how his name appeared on them, that’s the name he preferred, and that’s also the name by which he is widely known. When writing an anecdote about Fitzgerald, with personal details, an author such as Edmund “Bunny” Wilson might call him Scott or “Scott Fitzgerald.” In a bibliography, one may choose to elaborate on the name, like this:
R[onald] S[almon] Crane. Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
However, this is unnecessary for authors who are known almost exclusively by their initials (e.g., T. S. Eliot, and for that matter F. Scott Fitzgerald).
As for your comment on our transliteration table, I more or less agree. The table is under the section on “Russian”—we don’t have sections for many of the related languages. This is a bias. The manual is nearly one hundred years old, and it has probably tended to favor works typical of the oeuvre of the American university press. I agree that it does favor the sort of “tradition” of Russian literature in translation over Cyrillic-language writing that has been less well known and less widely published or translated in America. As for favoring the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, there are probably two explanations: (a) these forms are more likely to correspond to the spellings used to discuss those Russian names and terms whose spellings have now become nearly codified in English, especially for general audiences, and (b) though this standard does not always precisely provide an avenue from Russian to English and back, it is easier to type and implement. It is probably safer to say that people don’t follow the U.S. Board system but rather unconsciously reproduce its system whenever they use a word or a phrase in transliteration taken from another source. For specialist audiences, a “linguistic” system may well be more appropriate.
