Greg Hewgill ([info]ghewgill) wrote,
@ 2008-05-13 22:26:00
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not even wrong russian

Amy and I watched a movie on DVD yesterday and the first menu on the DVD was a language selection choice. Something struck me as odd about the list though:

The choice in the lower right is supposed to represent Russian. In the Cyrillic script, Russian is actually written Русский (transliterated as "Russkiy"). The last two letters are ИЙ in upper case and ий in lower case. The weird mirror-image Roman n must have been the result of somebody trying desperately to bash Cyrillic letters into a Roman character set. I can't imagine a system that would render text like that by default, so they must have gone to some manual effort to specifically mirror the n. Madness!

The other letter shapes are all wrong too, especially the k which shouldn't have an ascender.

Anyway, I thought it was amusing. I'll forgive you if you don't.


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[info]pne
2008-05-13 11:03 am UTC (link)
The funny thing is that while И looks like a mirror-image N, the lower-case letter looks like a u in cursive -- so if they had just written Pycckuŭ instead, the end would have looked a fair bit better!

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[info]pne
2008-05-13 11:05 am UTC (link)
It's also often amusing to see technical manuals written in German, where someone didn't have an eszett (ß) and so bashed a Greek beta (β) into submission, which - in the cases I've seen - tends to look rather different from the rest of the text (often italic, and sometimes wider or at least with larger inter-letter spacing than other letters).

Though I haven't seen that for about 20 years or so; I imagine that typography has made some advances since then.

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Gill Kayo Condensed
[info]bovineone
2008-05-13 05:09 pm UTC (link)
After using http://www.identifont.com/ and answering approximately 50 questions about the fonts, I was able to identify that font as Gill Kayo Condensed. That particular font does not include the Cyrillic character set, so that explains the irregular character substitutions. Presumably their graphic designer loved the font so much that they did not want to switch simply because it lacked the correct characters.

(I also tried to identify the font using http://www.whatthefont.com/, but it wasn't able to handle the complexity of the font, even after cropping the image numerous times.)

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Re: Gill Kayo Condensed
[info]ghewgill
2008-05-13 07:39 pm UTC (link)
I'm impressed. :)

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Re: Gill Kayo Condensed
[info]bovineone
2008-05-13 08:15 pm UTC (link)
Here's the Cyrillic codepage for Gill Kayo Condensed and you can see that the extended characters are mostly undefined.

I learned about the existence of the Identifont, MyFonts, and WhatTheFont facilities through one of my college buddies, who happens to do the backend development for MyFonts/WhatTheFont.

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Amusing!
[info]ivo
2008-05-13 06:54 pm UTC (link)
What I find amusing is that you find this amusing !!

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Re: Amusing!
[info]ghewgill
2008-05-13 07:39 pm UTC (link)
Always pleased to please!

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[info]goulo
2008-05-18 06:51 am UTC (link)
It doesn't inspire confidence about the quality of the subtitles themselves!

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