Why are there two different spelllings for the Russian ruler--czar and tsar?

Question

Why are there two different spelllings for the Russian ruler--czar and tsar?

Answer 1

They didn't use the Latin Alphabet, they use the Slavic Alphabet.  Its like when we try to translate Arabic you can have Koran or Quaran.  Its all pheonetic.

Answer 2

When you use words in English that come from languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, as we do, you sometimes come up with multuple spellings.  Transferring a foreign word from a non-latin alphabet is called transliteration.

We see this often  Peiking, Beijing - Bombay, Mumbai - tsar,czar - Tehran, Teheran....

It gets confusing sometimes.

Answer 3

it's a transliteration of a word that has sounds not in the english language: цар.

So, you get funky spellings. It's just writing it out "as it sounds."

The word is Slavic originally.

Answer 4

As with any word with different forms, there are any number of different reasons as to why a word is spelling a number of different ways. I speculate that ";Czar" was used for a while because the pronunciation is close to the original Russian (which was written in Cyrillic) and also because it is "close" to the word Caesar.

Tsar, however, is considered to be a true transliteration of the original Russian and appears to be the spelling preferred by scholars.