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]).

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 04:26:01PM -0700, MIG wrote:

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

Indeed. For looking out of the window of a train and realising "oh, I
need to get off here", what matters is that Russian (or Greek)
characters are pretty easy to recognise if you're literate in a language
that uses the Latin alphabet, even if you have no idea how KPACHbIE
BOPOTA is pronounced. That's because even if the letters appear to make
no sense (and some might be unrecognisable) there will be at least
*some* that you can easily remember, and then when you see the same name
again the whole name will be recognisable.

This does assume that it's in the same case as it was the first time you
saw it of course :-)

Japanese is an entirely different matter. Not a single character is
recognisable.

--
David Cantrell | Nth greatest programmer in the world

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