Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 February 28

= February 28 =

Cyrillic inscription
In the music video for Kosheen - Catch a Cyrillic inscription appears on the wall poster seemingly reading ОКТАР ВЕЛИКО ПАТУ! Google Translate suggests it's Serbian and should be октобар велико пату meaning "October, the great day!" (apparently referencing October Revolution, judging by the image of the Aurora cruiser below). What language this actually is and is it an accidental gross typo or macaronic? Brandmeistertalk  22:38, 28 February 2024 (UTC)


 * I think the first word on the poster is ОКТЯР, which doesn't help much. Perhaps some letters are missing from the beginning of the word, but I can't find a word that rhymes with октяр. The word велико can be standard Russian --Lambiam 12:43, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
 * As a native Russian speaker, I can say 100% this isn't Russian. Just like GTranslate, I thought of Serbian, but there's an odd thing: Google translates allegedly Serbian октобар велико пату as "October is a big day", but "day" in Serbian is дан, so I can't make heads or tails of this. Could be an attempt to emulate Russian by non-native speakers with the meaning of "October is a great date/month". Brandmeistertalk  13:02, 29 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Could it be possible that someone has mistranscribed ДАТУ as ПАТУ when creating the poster? If they've rendered ОКТЯБРЬ as ОКТЯР, I suppose anything's fair game. -- Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:39, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Yeah, looks like that... Brandmeistertalk  08:44, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * We still need to understand why the accusative case of дата is used. "ОТПРАЗДНУЙТЕ ОКТЯБРЬ, ВЕЛИКО ДАТУ!"? --Lambiam 14:41, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The only answer for me is that it's an imitation of Russian for some reason. At 1:00 the inscription is seen in full, so yeah, ПАТУ is likely ДАТУ - something like "[celebrate] the great date of October" ("October" is often used metonymically in Russian to refer to October Revolution). Brandmeistertalk  15:55, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
 * It's not Serbian, and it's not Bulgarian, for that matter (and none of the related Slavic languages, as far as I can tell). As you supposed, the mist likely answer is that it's a near-gibberish imitation of Russian. No such user (talk) 12:59, 4 March 2024 (UTC)