Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 March 27

= March 27 =

Cyrillic letter?
Is the letter in place of "N" in "UKRAINE" in the following image supposed to be En (Cyrillic)?

http://sportanalytic.com/uploads/images/default/antiniva.jpg

86.179.6.219 (talk) 20:05, 27 March 2013 (UTC)


 * It seems half-way between Cyrillic Н and Cyrillic И, which is weird since the rest of the word uses Latin script. Cyrillic Н would make the most sense if they were going to interpose a Cyrillic letter in a Latin word, but it seems to be malformed.  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  20:56, 27 March 2013 (UTC)


 * This just reflects the old-fashioned sloped ens--although someone obviously thinks it still needs to be backwards. You will see old Cyrillic ens made with sloping or descending crossbars, as is shown in our article Early Cyrillic alphabet or even better in this image http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/d/dd/Vater_unser_altkirchenslawisch.jpg from the German article. μηδείς (talk) 21:23, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems unlikely to me that there would be any (unintentional) errors in the typography, given that this is the official Ukrainian vest, which presumably must have been approved by some Ukrainian authority. When I first saw it I wondered if it was a visual joke, tinkering with the word "UKRAINE" to give it a bogus "Cyrillic" feel, in a kind of comic-book style. However, I'm not sure that such a style would be very appropriate in this situation. 86.179.6.219 (talk) 21:50, 27 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Whatever it is, it's stylised, since it accurately reflects no actual letter in any alphabet. I agree it's hard to credit that the Ukrainian authorities would have reversed the direction of the oblique stroke simply to inject a faux-Cyrillic feel.  On reflection, I think they've used a version of the early Cyrillic И, as per the 10th letter in this table.  But that's equally odd, since it’s a vowel (I) and what's needed here is a consonant (N).  --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  23:36, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I think it's just a stylized Latin N designed to look more like a large lowercase n. Angr (talk) 00:06, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I suspect it's a typically linguistically ignorant graphic designer who thinks (like Jack said a stylised) backwards letter "looks Russian". But I did want to point out that the "H"-like en of Slavic is a modern development, not the original. μηδείς (talk) 01:10, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * But wouldn't the Ukrainian team have used home-grown people (who by definition know the Cyrillic alphabet) for all their costumes and so on? Or, if anything was outsourced - and even if it wasn't - wouldn't the final products have been subject to rigorous scrutiny before being approved for use?  That it seems to have been specially designed this way suggests it was intentional and not just some slip up that nobody noticed until it was too late. The question is, what were they trying to communicate with this design? --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  03:06, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * To me it just looked like a "capitalised" small (latin) N - it is not unheard of for logo designers to deliberately incorporate one letter in a different case to the rest of the logo. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 14:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I saw рєасн brand vodka on the shelf a few weeks back. Took me half a minute to realize it wasn't "reasn" brand.  Doubt the graphic designer was Russian, or cared. μηδείς (talk) 20:36, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
 * We have an article (about everything); Faux Cyrillic. Alansplodge (talk) 09:36, 30 March 2013 (UTC)