Transliteration of Cyrillic Script

Abstract

IN Nature of March 28, p. 548, the hope is expressed that other countries which use the English alphabet will adopt the Royal Society's scheme for the transliteration of Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian. It is therefore important to point out that the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (an inter-departmental advisory body) considers the Royal Society's scheme to be unsuited to cartography. Far from letting things take their own course, the Permanent Committee has come to agreement with the United States Board on Geographic Names about the transliteration of Russian and Bulgarian. Serbian is officially written in both the Cyrillic and the Roman alphabets, and to transliterate Serbian geographical names into an English alphabet would produce objectionable variants of their official forms.