I noticed that Russian passport authorities now changed the spelling rules when issuing passports to travel overseas.
Russian names Елена (Yelena) and Егоров (Yegorov) used to be spelled as Elena and Egorov. Now they are spelled as Yelena and Yegorov - consistent with pronunciation adn following English, not French spelling as before.
It's not always consistent with the transliteration of the Russian E, which is pronounced as "ye" (in "yes") at the beginning of a word, after a vowel, ь or ъ but is similar to English "e" (in "pen") after consonants but palatalises the preceding consonant (except for always hard consonants). If I were to set up the rules of transliteration, I would suggest to always use "ye" when it's pronounced that way (which is becoming standard) and use E at the beginning to transliterate Э (e.g. Эльвира - Elvira)
As for the Russian
X it is not the same as English
H. English doesn't have its equivalent but other European languages do. German has both H and CH (hard and soft). Russian X is usulally transliterated as
KH to distinguish it from
H, which can now be used to transliterate Ukrainian and Belarussian
Г (sounds like Czech/Slovak
H) and from K. Many English speakers pronounce
KH as
K, which is incorrect but if they were taught it would be better to pronounce it at least as English
H (it's closer to the Russian X), if they can't manage Scottish CH (loch) or German CH (Bach) or Spanish J (Juan).
I would leave Харьков/
Kharkov (Russian) Харкiв/
Kharkiv (Ukrainian) as it is, otherwise if it's spelled with H (Harkiv) it could be interpreted as Гаркiв, not Харкiв.
With Ё it's probably better to transliterate the names phonetically too, although it makes the names even harder for English speakers - e.g. Звонар
ёва Zvonar
eva / Zvonar
yova.
BTW, I have a
Ё in my surname but I sacrificed to make it easier to pronounce in Australia. Even when in Russia, noone was sure about the correct word accent in my name if there were no dots over
Ё , so there were always 2 versions, I chose a simpler one when moved to Australia
