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From: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: This must be Bulgarian (audiobook?) -- Russian title is:
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Date: Fri, 17 May 2024 20:57:46 -0000 (UTC)
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On 2024-05-17, Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:

>> The Russian title is: Гёдель, Ешер, Бах: Эта бесконечная гирлянда
>
> I don't know why, but the Russian title shows first, then the Bulgarian, 
> where they spell it Гьодел. Russian ё normally spells /jo/; here it 
> seems to be rendering the foreign vowel /ö/, perhaps just because it 
> looks a bit like the German letter. But the Bulgarians seem to be 
> representing it as /jo/ -- could the Bulgarian version be a 
> re-translation of the Russian?

There are a lot of things in here.

I'll start by stressing that in the modern Slavic languages the
iotated vowel letters primarily indicate that the preceding consonant
is palatalized.  Only in special positions, e.g. at the start of
the word, do the iotated vowel letters also represent an actual
glide consonant /j/ preceding the vowel.

If you look across the modern variants of the Cyrillic alphabet as
used by the Eastern Slavic languages and Bulgarian, as well as
historical versions, you will notice that there are iotated versions
of a, e, and u, but there is no iotated o.  (Bear with me.)
I assume that reflects a historical phonotactical restraint such
that there were no palatalized consonants before o.  I don't know
enough about the history of the Slavic languages for details.  On
the rare occasions that the modern languages have a palatalized
consonant before o, Ukrainian and Bulgarian use a soft sign + o
spelling, i.e., <ьо>.

Russian stands out because it has a sort of iotated o, <ё>.  However,
that is the result of a late soundshift, where stressed /e/ after
but not before a palatalized consonant shifted somewhat inconsistently
to /o/.  This continued to be written <е> until <ё> was created
around 1800, and even today <ё> is not consistently differentiated
from <е> in Russian orthographic practice.

Belarusian also has <ё>.

When it comes to transcribing the German (French) front vowels
represented by ö (eu) and ü (u), Russian uses the iotated vowels
<ё> and <ю>.  This could be related to the fact that the Russian
vowels have fronted allophones after (ё) or between (ю) palatalized
consonants.

Ukrainian picks <е> and <ю> for transcribing the same foreign vowels,
i.e., it unrounds the mid vowel.

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder is rendered like this:
ru: Герхард Шрёдер
uk: Герхард Шредер
bg: Герхард Шрьодер

There is another aspect that might have some bearing on this.
Although a language like German (or English or French) does not
_distinguish_ between palatalized and unpalatalized consonants,
there is presumably some degree of allophonic palatalization happening
before front vowels.  So maybe my pronunciation of München has an
initial /mʲ/ to Russian ears, making the transcription Мюнхен quite
natural.  I don't know.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de