“Native” and “foreign” on the city signs: an experimental study
The relevance of this study is the need to study the effectiveness of the use of Latin letters in commercial names. The aim is to assess the feasibility of using Latin alphabet in the commercial names, which creates onomastic landscape of the city. An experimental study of the use of Russian and foreign commercial names using Cyrillic and Latin alphabets was conducted. The material consists of 156 commercial names recorded in Moscow. Commercial names, distributed in the following groups served as incentives: 1) foreign brands (Coca-Cola, Samsung); 2) commercial names of Russian companies registered in Latin script (Wildberries, Vis-à-vis, Bosco di Ciliegi, Savage); 3) Russian commercial names transliterated into Latin (Prolodki, Britva, Кuzina, Kolbasa, Bulka, Vodka, Divan); 4) Graphic hybrids names (Краsота, ПроПиzzа, Fарш); 5) foreign commercial names, transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet (Auchan, Rive Gauche, McDonald's, Ile de Beaute). The experiment showed that when pronouncing words written in Latin, a lot of mistakes are made, caused by phonemic-graphemic interference, self-correction, and the duration of pauses between words increases. The test subjects pronounced Russian words written in Latin without reduction of unstressed vowels. It is concluded that the Latinized commercial names are in many cases difficult to pronounce and rarely reproduced, therefore, the question arises about the appropriateness of their use for commercial purposes.