"CTO?!?!!!?!!?!!?" Topic

Which is pronounced "shtoh" in Russian, meaning "what?" (or in this case "WHAT?!?!!!?!!?!!?"), and is an example of what you can do using Roman/English letters to represent Cyrillic letters. I put a little writeup on Cyrillic letters as a subpage for my recent flying saucer project and though it might be useful beyond that project, so I though I would link to it here and not clutter up other milieu boards where it might apply with a bunch of flying saucers.

Enjoy.

Now I can put my own slogans on russian tanks.

Actually, what you are using there is called transliteration and the word you are looking for should be Shto, not CTO. The word in Russian you just wrote would be STO (which is not a real word), and that's not the same as Shto, which has a letter that looks more like an upside down reverse h and is usually pronounced ch but in this case is pronounced sh.

Here's a handy transliteration system- translit.cc

I see your UFO has the word Patrol on it (which is reverse transliterated from English). Why not just use the real Russian word патруль? Was the intention just to use Cyrillic transliteration?

Just curious.

Was the intention just to use Cyrillic transliteration?

It was transliteration for a pidgin Eastern European parallel scifi environment.

You're right that CTO is not how it would be written in Russian, rather in Bosnian transliterated into the (Bosnian)Cyrillic alphabet. Flashback mistake. Russian is not the only language using the Cyrillic or Cyrillic-family alphabets.

Ah, that's why. You said Russian and it really confused me.

Thanks for the clarification.

Yeah, I was trying to put the blurb together too fast (my flight started boarding) and wasn't precise.

Since you have some expertise in the matter, do you think the explanation of the Cyrillic alphabet is useful? It certainly isn't scholarly, but more information in a "hey this sport is popular, so I should learn a few things about it so I can be functionally literate, but I don't really want to immerse myself in it" way.

OTOH, my daughter hasn't studied any Russian (except various magazine phrases and swear words I have taught), but basic Cyrillic literacy helped her ace a scavenger hunt in St. Petersburg for a history class last month.