[pavel_lishin]

I just looked up the Russian wikipedia entry for it, and it's spelled "Лодзь", but it sounds like it's pronounced "Вуджь", and this fact irritates the hell out of me.

Why would it be transliterated with an Л? And an О? And a з? None of this makes sense.

[cyberax]

> Why would it be transliterated with an Л?

Because it _used_ to be pronounced this way in Polish! "Ł" pronounced as "L" sounds "theatrical" these days, but it was more common in the past.

[Muromec]

It's a general pattern of what russia does to names of places and people, which is aggressively imposing their own cultural paradigm (which follows the more general general pattern). You can look up your civil code provisions around names and ask a question or two of what historical problem they attempt to solve.

[aguaviva]

It's not a Russian-specific thing by any stretch.

This happens all the time when names and loanwords get dragged across linguistic boundaries. Sometimes it results from an attempt to "simplify" the respective spelling and/or sounds (by mapping them into tokens more familiar in the local environment); sometimes there's a more complex process behind it; and other times it just happens for various obscure historical reasons.

And the mangling/degradation definitely happens in both directions: hence Москва → Moscow, Paris → Париж.

In this particular case, it may have been an attempt to transliterate from the original Polish name (Łódź), more "canonically" into Russian. Based on the idea that the Polish Ł (which sounds much closer to an English "w" than to a Russian "в") is logically closer to the Russian "Л" (as this actually makes sense in terms of how the two sounds are formed). And accordingly for the other weird-seeming mappings. Then again it could have just ended up that way for obscure etymological reasons.

Either way, how one can be "irritated as hell" over any of this (other than in some jocular or metaphorical sense) is another matter altogether, which I admit is a bit past me.

[aguaviva]

Correction - it's nothing osbcure at all, but apparently a matter of the shift that accord broadly with the L sound in Polish a few centuries ago (whereby it became "dark" and velarized), affecting a great many other words and names (like słowo, mały, etc). While in parts east and south the "clear" L sound was preserved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ł

[int_19h]

Velarized L is a common phoneme in Slavic languages, inherited from their common ancestor. What makes Polish somewhat unusual is that the pronunciation of velarized L eventually shifted to /w/ pretty much everywhere (a similar process happened in Ukrainian and Belarusian, but only in some contexts).

[int_19h]

Adapting foreign names to phonotactics and/or spelling practices of one's native language is a common practice throughout the world. The city's name is spelled Lodz in Spanish, for example.

[cyberax]

Wait until you hear what Chinese or Japanese languages do with loanwords...