(1) there are several ways of spelling Russian Cyrillic names into Roman characters. What system of transliteration should be accepted in the nomenclature?
(2) should we translate or transliterate a generic (common) part of the place name?
(3) should we translate or transliterate a translatable word of a specific part of the name like First (Perviy), Second (Vtoroy), Minor (Maliy) etc.?
(4) in accordance with Russian grammar a specific part of most place names is in the genitive case or an adjective. This leads to additional endings which complicates a pronunciation. Should we change such names into nouns in the nominative case and omit these endings? This is often applied for some well known Russian geographic names.
(5) should we return to an original spelling of the names which originated from Western European explorers and were initially written in Roman characters?
By following discussions in PICES/POC meetings, we decided to use simple and unambiguous rules rather than linguistically sophisticated ones. Here, a common part of the place names will be translated into English form for the convenience of readers familiar to English. To spell a specific part of the names in English, we use basically the system of transliteration approved in 1947 jointly by the British Permanent Committee on Geographical Names and by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN/PCGN 1947).
This system was used for example in the Gazetteer of Official Standard Names prepared by the Geographic Names Division, U.S. Army Topographic Command, Washington, D.C. 1970. However some results of this system such as the endings-y and-yy appear to make pronunciation more difficult. We also referred to the most recent edition of the English-Russian Geographic Dictionary published by the Russky Yazyk Publishers, Moscow, 1994. Unfortunately, only major place names can be found in this dictionary. The following are the rules to spell some Russian sounds in English characters, which are adopted in this nomenclature article：
