Slight correction, his name technically is Semyon or Semion, "Semen" is just how anglos would pronounce it because they don't know how to make the Slavic equivalent sound.
Its not actually caused by Romanization though, because if it were, it would have been spelt with an I or a Y, as is usually done when translating the Cyrillic ё, this is almost certainly due to later humorous interpretations, which, to be fair, Semen is a lot funnier of a name.
No, it is a result of romanization: the dots over the ё are often dropped, and so it was historically considerably more common to romanize ё identically to е, this is also why it's "Gorbachev" and generally not "Gorbachov" or "Gorbachyov".
Slight correction, his name technically is Semyon or Semion, "Semen" is just how anglos would pronounce it because they don't know how to make the Slavic equivalent sound.
I already pointed this out in the original comment.
Its not actually caused by Romanization though, because if it were, it would have been spelt with an I or a Y, as is usually done when translating the Cyrillic ё, this is almost certainly due to later humorous interpretations, which, to be fair, Semen is a lot funnier of a name.
No, it is a result of romanization: the dots over the ё are often dropped, and so it was historically considerably more common to romanize ё identically to е, this is also why it's "Gorbachev" and generally not "Gorbachov" or "Gorbachyov".
Always bugged the shit out of me that ё is romanized to e in a lot of cases.
Thing is though that in (at least Russian) people also often drop the dots and write a normal e instead of ë
Tell me about it!
Gorbačëv