Odd. The first character is not the Russian ‘h’ sound (they actually don’t QUITE have an ‘h’, more like the Greek semi-vocalized ‘h’.) I wonder how it got changed in translation. I think that first letter is ‘g’.
Odd. The first character is not the Russian ‘h’ sound (they actually don’t QUITE have an ‘h’, more like the Greek semi-vocalized ‘h’.) I wonder how it got changed in translation. I think that first letter is ‘g’.
That's because it's a Ukrainian г, not a Russian one. From Wikipedia:
The letter 〈г〉 represents voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/, often transliterated as Latin h. It is the voiced equivalent of English /h/. Russian speakers from Ukraine often use the soft Ukrainian /ɦ/ in place of Russian /ɡ/, which comes from northern dialects of Old East Slavic. The Ukrainian alphabet has the additional letter 〈ґ〉 for /ɡ/, which appears in a few native words such as ґринджоли gryndžoly 'sleigh' and ґудзик gudzyk 'button'. However, /ɡ/ appears almost exclusively in loan words, and is usually simply written 〈г〉. For example, loanwords from English on public signs usually use 〈г〉 for both English g and h.