![]() ![]() Letterer Ken Bruzenak frequently used this trope on American Flagg! - particularly in the second series (formally, Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!).The meercat colony lives in a version of Coronation Street - but with all the shop and business names and show titles rendered in pseudo-Russian with lots of backwards letters. The "sponsored by" advertising bumps at the beginning and end of every screening of Coronation Street feature an insurance company that uses pseudo-Russian meerkats to shill its product.No backwards "R"s, but "Д" for "A", a backwards "Г" for "T" and "L", and something that almost looks like a "Ф" for "O". The UK bookshop Waterstones had a promotion on their website called "The Russian Revolutions".The label looks like a stereotypical Soviet propaganda poster and the product name has the backwards R as well as several faux-Cyrillic letters. Jon's Shaving Soap Company has a fragrance called Propaganda. A 2009 Polish commercial for Raiffeisen Bank plays it straight and subverts it at the same time the "revolutionary deposit" slogan is rendered into "Лokata Яewolucyjna" with the first word featuring the rather obscure (yet fitting in terms of pronunciation) "Л" character and the second one beginning with the Trope Namer.A 2013 ad for Clorox features Bud, DiЯectoЯ of KitcheИ SaИitatioИ who has a stereotypical faux-Russian accent.There's a UK insurance ad featuring a Backwards R and Socialist Realism style art.See also Randomly Reversed Letters and Spoofs "R" Us. (Sigma, delta, and lambda are actually the analogues of S, D and L, respectively, although delta is a "th" as in " then" in modern Greek.) Sometimes Greek letters are also used more or less correctly to write English as a substitution of real Greek language.Ĭompare Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut, Punctuation Shaker, Gratuitous Foreign Language, Letters 2 Numbers. This can also happen with alphabets other than Cyrillic, such as the use of the Greek letter sigma (Σ) as an E or delta (Δ) or lambda (Λ) as an A, even though "Ε" and "Α" are actually perfectly good Greek letters themselves. "Ү": (German Ü in Turkic Languages, such as Kazakh)."Ј": ("y", like in "yes", in Serbian and Macedonian).If you go to other languages written in Cyrillic, you'll find gems such as: However, because marking both hard 'and' soft consonants is redundant, the soft sign was kept, while the hard sign was relegated to extremely specific circumstances in most languages where you need a Y sound after a hard consonant, like in the Russian word 'съесть' (~ to have eaten)Īnd that's only the letters that exist in the Russian Alphabet note And the Bulgarian Alphabet, which has all letters of the Russian one except for Ё, Э, Ы specifically. Historically, they also had a rule that no syllable could end in a consonant, but as the short vowels represented by the yers vanished, the letters were repurposed to be hard or soft markers when there isn't a following vowel. "Ь": (soft sign / front yer, which historically made a vowel sound, but now just marks a consonant as soft, like silent E after C and G) note Slavic languages tend to have hard and soft versions of consonants with the soft versions typically adding a Y sound, with separate letters for each vowel for after a hard or soft consonant."Ъ": (hard sign / back yer, which historically made a vowel sound and still represents the schwa in Bulgarian, but now just marks a consonant as hard, like the ue in cheq ue)."Х": (guttural "kh", like the 'ch' in the Scottish 'loch', or the hard 'ch' in German 'Buch')."Ё": (yo not just a fronted/raised Е with a Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut).The number of Cyrillic letters that look similar or identical to Latin letters or numbers but represent slightly or entirely different phonemes doesn't help either: X: 'Ж' (zh) (pronounced like 'plea sure').W: 'Ш' (sh), 'Щ' (shch note well, scht like in schtick in Bulgarian). ![]() A: 'Д' (d) note even though (or more likely, because) the Cyrillic A is identical to the Latin A.
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