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Informal romanizations of Cyrillic

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Informal or ad hoc romanizations of Cyrillic have been in use since the early days of electronic communications, starting from early e-mail and bulletin board systems.[1] Their use faded with the advances in the Russian internet that made support of Cyrillic script standard,[1] but resurfaced with the proliferation of instant messaging, SMS and mobile phone messaging in Russia.

Development[edit]

Due to its informal character, there was neither a well-established standard nor a common name. In the early days of e-mail, the humorous term "Volapuk encoding" (Russian: кодировка "воляпюк" or "волапюк", romanized: kodirovka volapyuk) was sometimes used.[1]

More recently the term "translit" emerged to indiscriminately refer to both programs that transliterate Cyrillic (and other non-Latin alphabets) into Latin, as well as the result of such transliteration. The word is an abbreviation of the term transliteration, and most probably its usage originated in several places. An example of early "translit" is the DOS program TRANSLIT [2] by Jan Labanowski, which runs from the command prompt to convert a Cyrillic file to a Latin one using a specified transliteration table.

There are two basic varieties of romanization of Russian: transliterations and Leetspeak-type of rendering of Russian text. The latter one is often heavily saturated with common English words, which are often much shorter than the corresponding Russian ones, and is sometimes referred to as Runglish or Russlish.

Translit[edit]

Translit is a method of encoding Cyrillic letters with Latin ones. The term is derived from transliteration, the system of replacing letters of one alphabet with letters of another. Translit found its way into web forums, chats, messengers, emails, MMORPGs and other network games. Some Cyrillic web sites had a translit version for cases of encoding problems.

As computer and network technologies developed support for the Cyrillic script, translit fell into disrepute. Sometimes translit users were ignored or even banned in Cyrillic-using communities.[citation needed]

Translit received its last development impulse with the increasing availability of mobile phones in Cyrillic-using countries. At first, the situation was the same as with computers; neither mobile phones nor mobile network operators supported Cyrillic. Although mobile phone technology now supports Unicode including all variants of Cyrillic alphabets, a single SMS in Cyrillic is limited to 70 characters,[a] whereas a Latinate SMS can have up to 160 characters. If a message exceeds the character limit, it is split into multiple parts. That makes messages written in Cyrillic more expensive.

Common transliterations in translit
Letter Transliteration Letter Transliteration Letter Transliteration
а a к k, c ч ch, č, Ψ, 4
б b, 6 л l, Jl, Λ ш sch, sh, š, w, Ψ, 6
в v, w м m щ sh, shch, sch,
šč, shh, w
г g, Γ, s н n
д d, Δ, g о o ъ ', y, j, '', #,
or absent
е e, ye, je, ie п p, Π, n
ё yo, jo, io, e р r ы y, i, q, bl
ж zh, ž, j, z, g, *, >|< с s ь ', y, j, b
or absent
з z, 3 т t, m
и i, u у u, y э e, e', eh
й y, j, i, u,
or absent;
ий → iy, ый → yy;
-ий/ый → i, y 		ф f, Φ
х h, kh, x ю yu, ju, iu, u
ц c, z, ts, tc, u я ya, ja, ia, ea, a, q, 9, 9I

Sometimes ⟨y⟩, ⟨yu⟩, ⟨yo⟩, ⟨ye⟩, ⟨ya⟩ serve as transliteration for ⟨й⟩, ⟨ю⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨я⟩.

Common abbreviations for numerals
Number Usual transliteration Original word for it in Translit Original word in Russian
1 od odin один
2 dv dva два
3 tr tri три
4 ch chetyre четыре
5 p pyat' пять
6 sh shest' шесть
7 s sem' семь
8 vo vosem' восемь
9 dt devyat' девять

Such translit is often so distorted that native speakers have trouble reading it. The use of translit may be forbidden on Internet forums.[3]

Volapuk encoding[edit]

For the language, see Volapük.

Volapuk encoding (Russian: кодировка "волапюк", kodirovka "volapük") or latinitsa (латиница) is a slang term for rendering the letters of the Cyrillic script with Latin ones. Unlike Translit, in which characters are replaced to sound the same, in volapuk characters can be replaced to look or sound the same.

Etymology[edit]

The name Volapuk encoding comes from the constructed language Volapük, for two reasons. Cyrillic text written in this way looks strange and often funny, just as a Volapük-language text may appear. At the same time, the word "Volapük" ("Волапюк/Воляпюк" Volapyuk/Volyapyuk in Russian) itself sounds close to the words "воля" (will) and "пук" (fart), funny enough for the name to have stuck.

The term was popularized by its use in the first Soviet commercially available UUCP and TCP/IP network, RELCOM (a typical networking software package included Cyrillic KOI-8 to Volapuk transcoding utilities called tovol and fromvol, originally implemented by Vadim Antonov), making it the likely origin of the usage of Volapuk as applied to Cyrillic encoding.

History[edit]

Volapuk and Translit have been in use since the early days of the Internet to write e-mail messages and other texts in Russian where the support of Cyrillic fonts was limited: either the sender did not have a keyboard with Cyrillic letters or the receiver did not necessarily have Cyrillic screen fonts. In the early days, the situation was aggravated by a number of mutually incompatible computer encodings for the Cyrillic script, so that the sender and receiver were not guaranteed to have the same one. Also, the 7-bit character encoding of the early days was an additional hindrance.

Some Russian e-mail providers even included Volapuk encoding in the list of available options for the e-mails routed abroad, e.g.,

"MIME/BASE64, MIME/Quoted-Printable, volapuk, uuencode"[4]

By the late 1990s, the encoding problem had been almost completely resolved, due to increasing support from software manufacturers and Internet service providers.[4] Volapuk still maintains a level of use for SMS text messages, because it is possible to fit more characters in a Latinized SMS message than a Cyrillic one. It is also used in computer games that do not allow Cyrillic text in chat, particularly Counter-Strike.

Rules[edit]

Volapuk often replaces Cyrillic letters with Latin ones in order to look the same or at least similar as typed or handwritten Cyrillic letters.

  1. Replace "the same" letters: a, e, K, M, T, o. Capitalize when necessary for closer resemblance (к: K better than k, м: M better than m, т: T better than t (which looks exactly like 'm' in handwritten Cyrillic).
  2. Replace similar-looking letters: в – B, г – r (handwritten resemblance), з – 3 (i.e. number three), л – J| or /\ (the last is again handwritten resemblance), н – Н, п – n (handwritten resemblance), р – p, с – c, у – y, х – x, ч – 4, я – R, и – N or u (handwritten resemblance). This may vary.
  3. Replace all other non-obvious hard-to-represent characters using leet (any combination of Latin letters, numbers or punctuation that might bear a passing resemblance to the Cyrillic letter in question); there are many options for each letter. (For example, letter 'щ' can be encoded in more than 15 different ways). Examples: ж – *, щ – LLI_, э – -) and so on. The choice for each letter depends on the preferences of the individual user.

Encoding depends on the language as well. For example, Ukrainian-speaking users[5] have their own traditions, distinct from the Russian ones.

Example[edit]

  • Советский Союз (Cyrillic) [Soviet Union]
  • CoBeTcKuu' CoIO3 ("volapuk")
  • Sovetskiy Soyuz (transliteration)

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Because the UCS-2 encoding of Cyrillic for SMS requires 16 bits whereas Latin encoding requires just seven. For the long explanation, see SMS#Message size. (Most web sites use UTF-8, which encodes latin in 8 bits but still requires 16 for Cyrillic and even more – much more – for East Asian scripts.)

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Notice of cancellation of automatic volapuk encoding (1997) (Russian, in KOI8-R encoding)
  2. ^ Translit of early 1990s (Wayback Machine archived version)
  3. ^ search for "Правила форума: транслит запрещен", (e.g, forum rules: translit is forbidden)
  4. ^ a b A note of cancellation of automatic volapuk encoding (1997) (in Russian)
  5. ^ Instructions at the Ukrainian chat server Nyshporka Archived 2007-01-01 at the Wayback Machine (in Russian)

Bibliography[edit]

  • Frolov, A.V. and Frolov, G.V. Electronic Mail. Your Internet Companion (А.В. Фролов, Г.В. Фролов, "Электронная почта. Ваш спутник в Интернете") Russkaya Redaktsiya Publishers (Русская Редакция) (2000) ISBN 5-7502-0156-2, Chapter 6 online (in Russian)

External links[edit]

Translit external links[edit]

  • Kbd.winrus.com Online Service for Cyrillic (Russian and Ukrainian) – Virtual Keyboard "No translit!"
  • Outdated Transliterators Known problems of Transliteration Services and modern alternatives
  • Translit.biz Non-trivial Russian-English Transliteration (for domain names and URLs).
  • Translit Ru/En Online Russian-English Transliteration, supports multiple transliteration standards and spell check.
  • Translit.ru Russian-English transliterator and spell checker (in Russian).
  • Translit.site online service of transliteration. It supports different Russian-English translit standards.
  • Translit.tv, Russian-Latin transliterator, spell checker and translator (in Russian).
  • Русский ТРАНСЛИТ, a transliterator that also works on mobile devices.
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