I found Central Moscow very friendly to those of us only fluent in the
latin alphabet. The one exception was the Landing Card at the airport,
which is only available in Russian. I did think the airlines could have
made more of an effort to provide us with a translation.

That card is a stupid formality - I'd prefer it to be completely
removed. A lot of Russians complain that it is hard to get visa to
European countries or US, but somehow forget that getting visa to
Russia is even harder...

Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 11:17:20 on
Sat, 10 May 2008, Paul Corfield remarked:
I can't think of a city anywhere that makes it easy for people with
loads of fresh, high denomination currency to use standard public
transport services.

They've solved that in Geneva, where previously you had to have the
somewhat unlikely amount of 3 Francs in coins only, by giving all
arrivals at the airport a free bus/tram/train ticket to the City centre.

In Lisbon you can buy a voucher (for about a tenner) which will pay for
a taxi ride from the airport to anywhere in the city.

A useful scheme would be an EU-wide voucher for a "bus/train/tram ticket
from airport to anywhere in that City" for about 5 Euros,

London Ashford airport? Or even Luton and Stansted.

and you could
buy a book of them in any place and use them later. In most towns you
could do better ad-hoc, but at least you'd never be stranded.

My favourite was Ryanair's place in Sardinia, where you get the bus for
free (or at least people with hand baggage do, others got left behind),
but half way to the town it stops at a road-side florists where you buy
the tickets and get back on. Of course the florist had "no change". Some
of us made ourselves unpopular with the natives by clubbing together and
buying (say) 10 tickets with a single EUR10 note, those of us with loose
change then sorting the change out among the people on the bus :-)

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

On Sat, 10 May 2008, alex_t wrote:

Ah, maybe, but isn't there generally exactly one latin character
corresponding to one cyrillic character, even if not the ones that look
similar?

Not quite, because there are 33 (ish) cyrillic letters, and 26 latin ones,
which means that some cyrillic letters will have to be represented by
multiple latin letters.

Not exactly, it is usually much more complicated (but I don't think that
I can reproduce it well in this encoding).

Some tricky differences a
Russian "A" is pronounced as English "uh"
Russian "B" is equivalent to English "V"
Russian "C" is equivalent to English "S"
Russian "E" is pronounced to English "eh"
Russian "P" is equivalent to English "R"

When you say "russian X", you mean "russian letter that looks like an X",
right? Because the russian P is pronounced P, and it's written like a
greek letter pi. The letter that looks like a P is the russian R - it's
related to the greek rho. And the russian letter-that-looks-like-X,
incidentally, is a kh, like the greek khi.

I bellieve the russian letter-that-looks-like-C is cognate with the greek
letter sigma in its end-of-word form, so it really is an S, and not a C
that's pronounced funny. Although the true nature of C in english is a bit
odd itself - there's a funny dance between C, K, G, kappa and gamma over
the course of semitic, greek, latin, and the celtic, romance and germanic
language families about what sounds those letters represent, which somehow
ends up with english having a C that is sometimes S and sometimes K.

i shall edit the remainder of of this post to expunge the irritating C.

And one letter to one letter does not always work: (trying syrillik
kharakters) ? is pronounsed as English "shkh" ("sh" + "kh" quikly)

Yup. For those who kan't see KOI8 kharakters properly (like me!), this one
looks a bit like a rektangular W, possibly with a little tail like a Q, i
kan't remember.

A 15 senturies old mess ;-)

Indeed, a right old kok-up!

tom

--
For one thing at least is almost sertain about the future, namely,
that very much of it will be such as we should kall inkredible. --
Olaf Stapledon

alex_t wrote:
Ah, maybe, but isn't there generally exactly one latin character
corresponding to one cyrillic character, even if not the ones that
look similar?

Not exactly, it is usually much more complicated (but I don't think
that I can reproduce it well in this encoding).

Some tricky differences a
Russian "A" is pronounced as English "uh"
Russian "B" is equivalent to English "V"
Russian "C" is equivalent to English "S"
Russian "E" is pronounced to English "eh"
Russian "P" is equivalent to English "R"
and so on

And one letter to one letter does not always work:
(trying cyrillic characters)
Щ is pronounced as English "shch" ("sh" + "ch" quickly)

A 15 centuries old mess ;-)

Not quite - Russian "E" is more equivalent to English "yeh". They have
two sets of vowels, one "unvoiced" (like ours) and one "voiced" (as if
preceded by a "y").

"A" = Russian "A"
"yah" = Russian "looks like an R backwards"
"E" = Russian "looks a bit like a 3"
"yeh" - Russian "E"
"I" = Russian "looks like an N backwards"
"yih" = Russian "I"
"O" = Russian "O"
"yoh" = Russian "Ë" (that's E with two dots on it, if it doesn't come
out properly)
"U" = Russian "Y"
"yuh" = Russian "looks a bit like 10"

All very approximate - and that's just the capitals! And I may have some
wrong - it's 55 years since I did "O" Level!

Peter Beale

In message , at
18:55:21 on Sat, 10 May 2008, Arthur Figgis

I can't think of a city anywhere that makes it easy for people with
loads of fresh, high denomination currency to use standard public
transport services.
They've solved that in Geneva, where previously you had to have the
somewhat unlikely amount of 3 Francs in coins only, by giving all
arrivals at the airport a free bus/tram/train ticket to the City centre.
In Lisbon you can buy a voucher (for about a tenner) which will pay
for a taxi ride from the airport to anywhere in the city.
A useful scheme would be an EU-wide voucher for a "bus/train/tram
ticket from airport to anywhere in that City" for about 5 Euros,

London Ashford airport? Or even Luton and Stansted.

It's always going to be more difficult for London because the PT prices
are so much higher anyway. But if I can get a bus from the airport into
the centre of Berlin for £1.50, or a train from Schiphol to Amsterdam
for £2.60, or Brussels Airport to City Centre for £2.10, then I think we
should make more of an effort (for people with air tickets to prove
entitlement to the flat rate fare).

--
Roland Perry

On Sat, 10 May 2008 04:39:21 -0700 (PDT), Boltar
wrote:

On 10 May, 11:17, Paul Corfield wrote:
premium priced Tourist Travelcard. I can't think of a city anywhere that
makes it easy for people with loads of fresh, high denomination currency
to use standard public transport services. Many systems are farebox no

Paris - queue at the ticket office at the gare du nord , buy a Mobilis
(or whatever they're calling it this year). Sorted.

Heathrow - queue at the underground ticket office at Heathrow Central,
T4 or T5 and buy a One Day Travelcard or Bus Pass. Isn't that the
same? And, with a bit of luck, you'll find a queue shorter than at
the Gare du Nord.

Next time I travel through Heathrow I will try to imagine what it's
like for a tourist and see how easy, if indeed at all possible, it is
to buy an Oyster card, a one-day ticket underground or bus single
before leaving the airport. I remember there used to be ticket
machines in some baggage reclaim halls - I would hope to still find
them, with Oyster vending machines.

My usual bus route home is the X26 and I've apologised before -
pre-Oyster - about only having notes, still, they seem used to that
sort of thing. It would be the easiest thing in the world to have
both Oyster and single bus fare ticket machines (not the poor spec
roadside ones) in the Heathrow bus stations.

Richard.

On May 10, 6:45*pm, alex_t wrote:
Ah, maybe, but isn't there generally exactly one latin character
corresponding to one cyrillic character, even if not the ones that
look similar?

Not exactly, it is usually much more complicated (but I don't think
that I can reproduce it well in this encoding).

Some tricky differences a
Russian "A" is pronounced as English "uh"
Russian "B" is equivalent to English "V"
Russian "C" is equivalent to English "S"
Russian "E" is pronounced to English "eh"
Russian "P" is equivalent to English "R"
and so on

And one letter to one letter does not always work:
(trying cyrillic characters)
ý is pronounced as English "shch" ("sh" + "ch" quickly)

A 15 centuries old mess ;-)

Sorry I was out for a while, but it seems to me that the relationships
with English pronunciation are probably not the relevant ones.

Are the relationships with latin-using slavic languages simpler and
more one-to-one? (Eg slavic c being english ts and so on [I notice
that also being the case for Pinyin Chinese]).

When you say "russian X", you mean "russian letter that looks like an X",
right?

Yep, exactly. I was trying to be clever and avoid encoding
problems ;-)


Yup. For those who kan't see KOI8 kharakters properly (like me!), this one
looks a bit like a rektangular W, possibly with a little tail like a Q, i
kan't remember.

I don't think those were KOI8 characters, my Firefox is set to UTF-8
encoding... then again, I have no idea really.
Also, I have custom made Russian keyboard layout which only one person
in world uses (me) - and I have no idea whether this is mapped to
Unicode Russian, Windows Russian, or UNIX Russian (KOI-8).

On Sat, 10 May 2008, alex_t wrote:

When you say "russian X", you mean "russian letter that looks like an
X", right?

Yep, exactly. I was trying to be clever and avoid encoding
problems ;-)

Yup. For those who kan't see KOI8 kharakters properly (like me!), this
one looks a bit like a rektangular W, possibly with a little tail like
a Q, i kan't remember.

I don't think those were KOI8 characters, my Firefox is set to UTF-8
encoding... then again, I have no idea really.

Your content-type header said KOI8. It's possible that you sent it as
UTF-8 but that it got transcoded at some point along the way, i think.

Also, I have custom made Russian keyboard layout which only one person
in world uses (me) - and I have no idea whether this is mapped to
Unicode Russian, Windows Russian, or UNIX Russian (KOI-8).

Pass! I would imagine that your operating system, if it's modern, is using
unicode internally, that your newsreader is using unicode represented as
UTF-8 (as you said), but that before it goes to the network, it's getting
encoded as KOI8. BICBW.

tom

--
I DO IT WRONG!!!

Pass! I would imagine that your operating system, if it's modern, is using
unicode internally, that your newsreader is using unicode represented as
UTF-8 (as you said), but that before it goes to the network, it's getting
encoded as KOI8. BICBW.

My "newsreader" is actually Google Groups - who known what weird
things Google's doing "out there" ;-)