Something interesting that I don’t know what it means yet [I Love History]

This is a Soviet map of Catalonia from 1975, the last year of Franco’s (direct) rule over Catalonia and Spain. Catalan language and culture were still being repressed and persecuted.

However, it appears that this map was translated to Russian from Catalan, and not Spanish. It has Catalan pronunciations for certain letters instead of Spanish.

For example, if you look at a place that starts with an English ‘G’, like Girona. In Russian, Girona is written as ‘Жерона’


The sound that the first letter, ж (zhe) makes is ʒ, the voiced palato-alveolar fricative. You know this sound, even if you haven’t heard the name of it. This is the sound that the ‘s’ makes in words like ‘pleasure’, ‘treasure’, or ‘usually’.

This sound is found in Catalan (words like Josep, gerro) but not Spanish. In Spanish, if a ‘g’ is followed by an ‘e’ or ‘I’ (at the start of a word) it is pronounced like an English ‘H’. This would use the Russian letter х (kha / ha).

If translated from Spanish to Russian, it should say ‘Херона’. But since there is a ж, it leads me to believe that the map was translated from Catalan to Russian, despite being during the Franco era.