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Yuny
Clarence Brown's introduction to his 1993 translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We sez:
The inhabitants of OneState have only numbers, no names, and they all wear the same uniform, only the word "uniform," the author tells us, hasbeen worn down by time to "unif." That's what Zamyatin writes in Russian, the Cyrillic equivalents of those four letters: u-n-i-f. All previous translators known to me have opted for "unif" in their English versions.
This struck me as wrong. I did not think an English speaker (and an English translation has no other point than to make the characters English speakers) would naturally come up with "unif" as the worn-down stump of "uniform." So I made it "yuny," jettisoning the f (which seemed to me especially clumsy when clustered with an s in the plural: "unifs") and adding an initial y to make the pronunciation unmistakable.
This is a good idea gone terribly wrong. "Unif" is indeed an unnatural abbreviation for an English-speaking community to come up with, but I find the bizarre spelling of "yuny" even less believable. What's more, Brown's explanation reveals that "yuny" is not just stupid but also patronizing. Seriously, who is this sheltered flower Brown is writing for, whose education has led them here — the Penguin Classics edition of a Jazz-Age Russian dystopia — without ever clarifying the pronunciation of the prefix "uni-"?
(And won't it be a problem if they don't know the word "uniform" at least? Imagine their first encounter with the term in We: "'Yuny' is derived from the old word... 'unnyform'? What the devil—?" In the background, a unitarian in a unisex unitard rides a unicycle past the window.)
Mind you, "yuny" would be fine if it were part of a general worldbuilding-through-language-change approach. I have no objection to Orwell's "Miniluv" or Burgess's "gulliver." But a single radically changed term (for something quite peripheral) in a sea of standard British English makes no sense. It's especially weird given that the rest of Brown's translation is eminently readable, indicating that he made natural-sounding English a high priority. He may have been driven temporarily mad with power.
Anyway, to get back to the "unif" thing: I was intrigued by the idea that this abbreviation might have made more sense in Russian than "uni." Loan words often end up treated in ways that seem cruel and unusual to speakers of their language of origin. (The word suto, from sutoraiki, is perfectly euphonious in Japanese; it doesn't matter that no English-speaking Marxist would call for a "general st.")
So, hat in hand, I e-mailed Don Hat — who not only speaks Russian (and English) but also recently read the work in question — to ask him what he thought. With his permission, I give you his reply:
OK, in the first place, it's not from English but French; the Russian note in Chapter 2 on "в голубоватых юнифах" ("in light blue yunifs," the first occurrence) says "Вероятно, от древнего 'Uniforme'" — "probably from the ancient 'Uniforme'." In the second place, I think rendering it "yuny" is a lousy idea based on an incoherent thought process; it makes it look like a direct rendering of a Russian word, which it's not. If you're going to go with "uni," why not spell it "uni"? But yes, ending the shortened form with a consonant is more natural in Russian; it makes it easier to add case endings (like the locative plural юнифах in the above quote).
Background information: the normal Russian word for uniform is форма (forma), which is (via Polish) from Latin forma. There is a word униформа (uniforma — n.b.: starts with u-, not yu-), but it's archaic and I'm not sure how many Russians are familiar with it.
The more you know!
Serge:
Matt,
Please be careful about your sources.
>But yes, ending the shortened form with a consonant is more natural in Russian;
Untrue: it makes no difference.
>it makes it easier to add case endings (like the locative plural юнифах in the above quote).
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Are books written with the purpose to showcase specifics case endings? Locative plural with any other ending would have sounded just as natural in this case.
>There is a word униформа (uniforma — n.b.: starts with u-, not yu-),
>but it's archaic and I'm not sure how many Russians are familiar with it.
Untrue again. Nothing archaic about this word, it's frequently used and familiar to everyone.
On the whole, in Russian, coining new words by shortening existing ones sounds very 1920s...