... in response to Non-Cyrillic postal addresses, posted by TwoBitBandit on Apr 3, 2004Most MOB sites use English because it is the most widely used language in the world. I traveled in 57 countries, covering every continent except Antarctica. While it is not easy sometimes, I could always find some one who could speak English. Those Russian girls who are particularly looking for their future husbands in Germany or Italy, not in USA or UK, still post their resumes in English. Furthermore, they clearly indicate they don’t understand English. However, there exist MOB sites in other languages, for example in German, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian and even Japanese. Don’t worry about if your letters would reach your intended destinations.
Practically every country has a standardized way to write the names of their cities in Roman (not English) characters. The pronunciation generally follows Hepburn (spelling?) format, which does not necessarily, coincides with English. Neither does it coincide with other European languages. Russian words spelled in Roman characters sometimes do not follow even HF. For example, a common Russian woman’s name Yuliya (HF) is often spelled Julia, which can be pronounced correctly in German but not in English or Spanish or any other language, which adopts H.F. There is a saying, “A German word is pronounced exactly as it is written, a French word is pronounced consistently not as it is written, and an English word is pronounced inconsistently.” George Barnard Shaw once asked, “How do you pronounce ghoti?” His answer was, “Fish.” He explains: should be pronounced “f” as in enough, be “i” as in women and be ”sh” as in .
