electronic communication
Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that ...
s, starting from early
e-mail
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
and
bulletin board system
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
n
internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
that made support of
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, ...
standard, but resurfaced with the proliferation of
instant messaging
Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...
,
SMS
Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...
and
mobile phone
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...
messaging in Russia.
Development
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
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.
More recently the term "
translit
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.
" 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
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...
, and most probably its usage originated in several places. An example of early "translit" is the
DOS
DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems.
DOS may also refer to:
Computing
* Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel
* Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
program TRANSLIT by Jan Labanowski, which runs from the
command prompt
Command Prompt, also known as cmd.exe or cmd, is the default command-line interpreter for the OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Microsoft Windows (Windows NT family and Windows CE family), and ReactOS operating systems. On Windows CE .NET 4.2, W ...
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
Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblanc ...
-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
Runglish, Ruslish, Russlish (russian: рунглиш, руслиш, русслиш), or Russian English, is a term describing a language born out of a mixture of the English and Russian languages. This is a common among Russian speakers who speak ...
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
ones. The term is derived from
transliteration
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...
, the system of replacing letters of one alphabet with letters of another. Translit found its way into web forums, chats, messengers, emails,
MMORPG
A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a video game that combines aspects of a role-playing video game and a massively multiplayer online game.
As in role-playing games (RPGs), the player assumes the role of a Player charac ...
s 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.
Translit received its last development impulse with the increasing availability of
mobile phone
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...
s in Cyrillic-using countries. At first, the situation was the same as with computers; neither mobile phones nor
mobile network operator
A mobile network operator (MNO), also known as a wireless service provider, wireless carrier, cellular company, or mobile network carrier, is a provider of wireless communications services that owns or controls all the elements necessary to sell ...
s supported Cyrillic. Although mobile phone technology now supports Unicode including all variants of Cyrillic alphabets, a single
SMS
Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...
in Unicode is limited to 70 characters, 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.
Sometimes ⟨y⟩, ⟨yu⟩, ⟨yo⟩, ⟨ye⟩, ⟨ya⟩ serve as transliteration for ⟨й⟩, ⟨ю⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨я⟩.
Lately a more aggressive form of translit appeared, its identifying characteristic being the use of numbers to substitute some of the letters. For example, 4 reads as "ch" and is used to translit letter "ч", from the transliteration of the word "four" in Russian ("Chetyre", четыре), or, arguably, the appearance of the letter similar to that of four in
Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write Decimal, decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers ...
. Also, a number can substitute its whole name as part of a word: "sov7" for "sovsem" ("completely") or "posmo3" for "posmotri" ("have a look", imperative).
Such translit is often so distorted that native speakers have trouble reading it. The use of translit is forbidden on many Internet forums.
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
and other
former Soviet republics
The post-Soviet states, also known as the former Soviet Union (FSU), the former Soviet Republics and in Russia as the near abroad (russian: links=no, ближнее зарубежье, blizhneye zarubezhye), are the 15 sovereign states that wer ...
adopted the
ISO 9
ISO 9 is an international standard establishing a system for the transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters constituting the alphabets of many Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
Published on February 23, 1995 by the Internatio ...
transliteration standard for official use (under the designation 7.79-2000), replacing the old Soviet
GOST 16876-71 GOST 16876-71 (russian: ГОСТ 16876-71) is a romanization system (for transliteration of Russian Cyrillic alphabet texts into the Latin alphabet) devised by the National Administration for Geodesy and Cartography of the Soviet Union. It is based ...
.
Translit in Bulgaria
A modified version of Translit, called Shlyokavitsa or Maimunitsa is used widely on the Internet in Bulgaria. It is similar to Russian translit, except for the following differences:
* ⟨ъ⟩ can be transliterated as ⟨a⟩, ⟨u⟩ and ⟨y⟩ and rarely as ⟨1⟩
* ⟨я⟩ is usually transliterated as ⟨q⟩, but ⟨ya⟩, ⟨ja⟩ and ⟨ia⟩ can be seen
* ⟨ч⟩ is transliterated as either ⟨4⟩ or ⟨ch⟩
* ⟨ц⟩ is transliterated as either ⟨ts⟩ or ⟨c⟩
* ⟨ж⟩ is transliterated as ⟨j⟩, sometimes ⟨v⟩
* ⟨ю⟩ is transliterated as either ⟨iu⟩, ⟨yu⟩, ⟨ju⟩ or ⟨u⟩
* ⟨й⟩ is transliterated as either ⟨i⟩, ⟨y⟩ or ⟨j⟩
* ⟨ь⟩ is usually transliterated either the same as ⟨й⟩, or omitted
* ⟨ш⟩ is transliterated as ⟨6⟩ or ⟨sh⟩
* ⟨в⟩ is mostly transliterated as ⟨v⟩, but ⟨w⟩ has been seen due to the placement of the letter on the Bulgarian phonetic traditional keyboard
* ⟨щ⟩ is transliterated as ⟨6t⟩ or ⟨sht⟩
Some of these transliterations come from the placement of the letters on the Bulgarian phonetic traditional keyboard, even if the corresponding latin letter has nothing in common:
* ⟨я⟩ as ⟨q⟩
* ⟨ъ⟩ as ⟨y⟩
* ⟨ц⟩ as ⟨c⟩
* ⟨ж⟩ as ⟨v⟩
Some people type in Shlyokavitsa entirely like there were on the Bulgarian phonetic traditional keyboard, leading to some symbols being used:
* ⟨ч⟩ as ⟨ ` ⟩
* ⟨ш⟩ as ⟨ ⟩
* ⟨щ⟩ as ⟨ ⟩
* ⟨ю⟩ as ⟨ \ ⟩
This leads to things like spelling "чушка" (pepper) as ⟨`u[ka⟩.
Volapuk encoding
Volapuk encoding (russian: кодировка "волапюк", ''kodirovka "volapük"'') or ''latinitsa'' (латиница) is a slang term for rendering the letters of the
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, ...
with
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
ones. Unlike
Translit
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.
, in which characters are replaced to sound the same, in volapuk characters can be replaced to look or sound the same.
Etymology
The name ''Volapuk encoding'' comes from the constructed language
Volapük
Volapük (; , "Language of the World", or lit. "World Speak") is a constructed language created between 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God had told him in a dream to create an i ...
, 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
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
commercially available
UUCP
UUCP is an acronym of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers.
A command named is one of the prog ...
and
TCP/IP
The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...
network,
RELCOM
RELCOM or Relcom (russian: РЕЛКОМ, Релком), an acronym for "RELiable COMmunications" is a computer network in Russia. It was launched in the Soviet Union on August 1, 1990 in the Kurchatov Institute in collaboration with DEMOS co-operat ...
(a typical networking software package included Cyrillic
KOI-8
KOI-8 (КОИ-8) is an 8-bit character set standardized in GOST 19768-74. Маркелова Л. Н. Эксплуатация программоуправляемой вычислительной машины «Искра 226». — М.: Ма ...
to ''Volapuk'' transcoding utilities called ''tovol'' and ''fromvol'', originally implemented by
Vadim Antonov
Vadim Antonov (russian: Антонов Вадим Геннадьевич) born May 25, 1965 is a Russian-American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is known for his work on operating systems, Internet backbone networks, network router hardw ...
), making it the likely origin of the usage of ''Volapuk'' as applied to Cyrillic encoding.
History
Volapuk and
Translit
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.
have been in use since the early days of the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
to write
e-mail
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
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
In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...
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"A note of cancellation of automatic volapuk encoding (1997)
By the late 1990s, the encoding problem had been almost completely resolved, due to increasing support from software manufacturers and Internet service providers. 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 Unicode one. It is also used in computer games that do not allow Cyrillic text in chat, particularly ''
Counter-Strike
''Counter-Strike'' (''CS'') is a series of multiplayer tactical first-person shooter video games in which teams of terrorists battle to perpetrate an act of terror (bombing, hostage-taking, assassination) while counter-terrorists try to preven ...
''.
Rules
Volapuk often replaces Cyrillic letters with Latin ones in order to look the same or at least similar as typed or handwritten Cyrillic letters.
# 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).
# 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. This may vary.
# Replace all other non-obvious hard-to-represent characters using
leet
Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. ...
(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 usersInstructions at the Ukrainian chat server ''Nyshporka'' have their own traditions, distinct from the Russian ones.
Table
I
Example
* Советский Союз (Cyrillic) 'Soviet Union''* CoBeTcKuu' CoIO3 ("volapuk")
* Sovetskiy Soyuz (transliteration)
Russian Chat Alphabet
The Russian Chat Alphabet is a fast-to-type mix of translit and Volapuk, being translit mostly, but giving the option to replace some 2 or 3 character transliterations with shorter 1 character counterparts from Volapuk. This speeds up typing; however, in some cases characters may be Volapuk-encoded, making text appear incorrectly and therefore be harder or impossible to read. In
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
and countries where Russian is used regularly to communicate via
mobile phone
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...
and
chat room
The term chat room, or chatroom (and sometimes group chat; abbreviated as GC), is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology, ranging from ...
, it is used as an alternative and free style of
transliteration
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...
. It also works around the limitations of programs and/or devices where a Cyrillic keyboard is not available.
Within Russia, one reason to use transliteration for Russian text is that mobile characters allow for more
Latin characters
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Ital ...
than Cyrillic ones per SMS: Latin and capital
Greek letters
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...
are covered by the GSM seven-bit alphabet, allowing up to 160 such characters in a message, while Cyrillic letters are not, requiring a 16-bit encoding that limits messages to 70 characters. In this case, the focus is of course on getting one Latin character (of which there are 26) for each Cyrillic character (of which there are 33 in Russian, and additional characters in
Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
and other languages using Cyrillic script). Only those used for Russian are exemplified here.
Where variants are given, the first is most common and the last is less common, although trends change quickly and differ from person to person. Lack of standardization is the biggest weakness of this informal transliterations, as different styles contradict each other and can make reading slower than necessary.
I
See also
*
Transliteration
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...
*
Romanization of Russian
The romanization of the Russian language (the transliteration of Russian text from the Cyrillic script into the Latin script), aside from its primary use for including Russian names and words in text written in a Latin alphabet, is also essential ...
*
Arabic chat alphabet
The Arabic chat alphabet, ''Arabizi'', Franco-Arabic (), refer to the Romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Arabic numerals. These informal chat ...
*
Romanization of Ukrainian
The romanization of Ukrainian, or Latinization of Ukrainian, is the representation of the Ukrainian language in Latin alphabet, Latin letters. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, which is based on the Cyrillic script. Rom ...
Mojibake
Mojibake ( ja, 文字化け; , "character transformation") is the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, ofte ...
Kbd.winrus.com Online Service for Cyrillic (Russian and Ukrainian) – Virtual Keyboard "No translit!"
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
{{Internet Dialects
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...