Excerpt from War and Peace, Vol. 1 of 2: A Historical Novel; Borodino, the French at Moscow, Epilogue, 1812-1820

The transliteration of Russian into English pre sents many difficulties the alternative lies between a ponderous array of letters and the adoption of a code of foreign sounds, for the vowels more especially. Mr. Schuyler, in his work on Turkistan (london, gives the letter a the value of the English 00 (as in German and Italian); he writes find, at the risk of its being made to rhyme with mud, instead of with mood; and it is this risk which has led many good authorities to modify the a into ou, with the sound the diphthong has in could. In French it is written ou, as the letter u has a sound unlike any that can be written in English.