Cyrillic Alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet used in RussianLanguage. (Other SlavonicLanuage?s have extra letters or lack some of the letters described below) Letter(The way it's written in case you don't have Cyrillic font installed) - how to spell, [transcription.]

[Cyrillic-capable users: make sure your browser is switched to the Windows-1251 code page as its original author placed the cyrillic chars in 1251 encoding. This specially affects Unix users because koi8-r is used there; it also affects everyone including Windows users just because koi8-r is the standard for cyrillic alphabet in network communications since rfc1489]

Actually it had been the standard for many years prior to that (and koi7 before that); rfc1489 merely recognized an existing de facto standard.

 À(A) - spelt and read as something between [a:] and [^]
 Á(uh, imagine B without the top arc) - spelt 'beh', [b]
 Â(B) - spelt 'veh', [v]
 Ã(upturned L) - spelt 'geh', [g]
 Ä(impossible to describe, use D) - spelt 'deh', [d], but the tongue is closer to the teeth.
 Å(E) - 'yeah' [e]
 ¨(E with umlaut) - spelt 'yo', [o] and softens preceding consonant or [jo] when the first letter of thw word.
 Æ(wide X with extra vertical line in the middle) - spelt 'sure' as in measure, [zh] as in mea[zh]ure
 Ç(looks like 3) - spelt 'zeh', [z]
 È(mirrored N) - spelt 'ee', [i.]
 É(mirrored N with a small upturned circumflex) - spelt 'ee KRUT-koy-yeah', 'short ee', [j] as in [j]acht.
 Ê(K) - spelt 'keh', like [k] but weaker
 Ë(JI connected at the top, or an upturned V) - 'el', like [l], but the tongue is closer to the teeth.
 Ì(M) - 'em', [m]
 Í(H) - 'en', link [n], but the tongue is closer to the teeth.
 Î(O) - 'oh', [o.]
 Ï(II connected at the top) - 'peh', like [p], but with no strong exhale
 Ð(P) - 'ehr', Scottish, Spanish, German [r]
 Ñ(C) - 'es', [s]
 Ò(T) - 'teh', [t], but the tongue is closer to the teeth.
 Ó(Y that looks like y) - 'oo', [u:] as in r[u:]f
 Ô(er, a striken-through 0, rotated 90 degrees) - 'ef', [f]
 Õ(X) - 'khe', Scottish [kh]
 Ö(II connected at the bottom with a small tail at the right) - 'tse', [ts] as German [z]

more to go

 ×()
 Ø(III connected at the bottom)
 Ù(III connected at the bottom with a small tail at the right)
 Ú()
 Û()
 Ü()
 Ý()
 Þ()
 ß()

Moved from CyrillicAphabet:

One of several alphabets derived from one traditionally attributed to Saints Cyril and Methodius. Used in Bulgarian, Russian, Ukranian, and many more.

man page excerpt: "KOI8-R was designed for mixed Russian/English texts and covers only Russian Cyrillic characters, so if you're looking for Ukrainian, Byelorussian, etc. Cyrillic characters, try ISO-IR-111, or KOI8-U (Ukrainian Character Set), or KOI8-C (for ancient Russian texts) instead, which are identical to KOI8-R in the Russian Cyrillic letters area. A more complete set of Cyrillic characters is also defined by the ISO-8859-5 character set (but which never really caught on)."

Letters which have approximately the same value in Romand and Cyrillic: A, E, I (Ukranian, et al), K, M, O, T.

Letters which look like Roman but have very different values: B (/v/), C (/s/), H (is in fact, /n/ and has a very different history), P (/r/), X (/kh/), Y (/u/).

Letters which look nothing like Roman: well, can't figure out how to get these to display. Use cyrillic encoding of your browser - here we go: Á, Ã, Ä, Å, Æ, Ç, È, É, Ë, Ï, Ó, Ô, Ö, ×, Ø, Ù, Ü, Ú, Þ, ß

The Russian word for restaurant can be written in 7-bit AsciiCode: PECTOPAH.

The Cyrillic block in UniCode occupies u0400 to u04ff and includes a lot of non-Russian and historical letters as well. The code table is at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0400.pdf. If UniCode won't help you, see http://www.siber.org/sib/russify/ for instructions on how to Cyrillic-enable your system.

UniCode is, however, the international standard for all scripts, and unless explicitly inoperable for a particular use, is preferred for interchange when possible, regardless of what a system uses internally.