Why Russia — “country of the inverted letter”
Whether one and the same “I” and R, which means in Latin “YESHUA DДУ” and where the Russian took the “dick” — a new linguistic study “My Planet”.
Upstairs
One of the things complicated by life foreign fans this summer in Russia, Russian letters, the inscriptions on which the alien could not be read. Some letters are upside down, others look the same as in the native Latin alphabet, but read quite differently, and some icons are not similar to anything. How did it happen?
B and B
In Latin it’s simple: after A (which we recounted last time) is B. the Cyrillic alphabet between these two letters somehow squeezed into the “B”, and our “In” we read as “CE”. What is wrong with us?
The fact that srednegorodskoy language spoken in the Byzantine Empire, no sound [b]. At some point, the letter B, formerly known as “beta,” has come to denote the sound [V] and be read as “Vita”. Hence the word “alphabet” — alpha + Vita. For comparison, the English alphabet is derived from the words alpha and beta.
In Slavic languages, the sound [b] was present, and it was necessary to designate. To do this, scientists of the Byzantine monks Cyril and Methodius (and their students) have slightly modified the “In” — “Vitu”. According to another version, the mark “B” goes back directly to the Phoenician letter “Beth”.
“And” and N
If the English public want to submit the label with the “Russian” flavor, the use of Cyrillic letters for writing English words. For example: “YESHUA DДУ” will refer to the NEW DAY (it’s terrible).
One of the letters, which suffers from such exercises Western creatives, “And”. Perfect for such bullying literature dates back to the Greek H, which was called “this”, in the modern version — “ITA”.
According to one of the most convincing theories, all of us known letters date back to the hieroglyphics, which were images of objects. So, N in Phoenician alphabet was called the “hat” and looked like a lattice or fence. A similar character, more reminiscent of a grid-netting, can be seen in the Egyptian symbolic system.
News
The ancient Semitic letter meant “GE” fricative, known to us by Ukrainian or southern Russian accent. The same meaning it had among the ancient Greeks, from whom passed to the Latins. But then “the Ukrainian GE” from the Greek language disappears and the letter begins to denote the sound [and]. So it was in the old Slavonic language, for which Cyril and invented the alphabet.
And what about N? It dates back completely to another Phoenician letter “nun” refers to a snake. There is a similar Egyptian hieroglyph. Through the Greek “nu” she came to the Slavic alphabet, where he received the name “Nash”.