"Cyrillic or not to Cyrillic" Topic

I have a future project of painting 1805 Russians and French using the OOB for the battle of Krem. I usually have labels on my bases, written in the language of the nation the troops belong to. To my Russians I have two choices. Label them in Russian using the English alphabet, or to jump in with both feet and do it Cyrillic. This means that the 8th Jager Regiment(if Google Translate got it right), comes out as 8-y Yegerskiy polk / 8 åãåðñêèé ïîëê.

Little Russia Grenadier reg't:
Malen'kaya Rossiya grenaderskogo polka* / Ìàëåíüêàÿ Ðîññèÿ ãðåíàäåðñêîãî ïîëêà

Smolensk Musketeer regiment:
Smolensk Mushketer polka / Ñìîëåíñê Ìóøêåòåð ïîëêà

Empress Cuirassier Reg't:
Imperatritsa kirasirskaya polka / Èìïåðàòðèöà êèðàñèðñêàÿ ïîëêà

I like the Cyrillic for the look, but I am going to have to make flash cards and force myself to recognize the Cyrillic designations. Which means other players are not going to understand the labels. I suppose I could put in English underneath the base.

* Put the accordian down and nobody will get hurt ;>) .

Absolutely crazy….& why not?

You have to be a little crazy to be a wargamer & if this amuses you, you should do it.

I just don't like people people picking up my figures especially if they don't ask.
The Cyrillic labelling is a good idea in principle but my personal opinion us ti do it in English to educate the spectators and especually the kids our future gamers as to the historical unit.
For your own learning experience you could put the Cyrillic on the bottom and slowly teach it to yourself abd in conversation can show it to others.
As I stated that is just me do what you feel best with. You are the Tsar.

Your translations are wrong, both Russian and English. I don't know if the actual regiments existed but:

Little Russia Grenadier reg't is wrong translation. Malorossia is Ukraine. Should be Malorosiisky Grenadyorsky Polk. Yes, it could be translated Little Russia, but it's wrong.

Smolensk Musketeer regiment – Smolensky Mushketeorsky Polk.

Empress Cuirassier Reg't – Kuirasirsky Polk Imperatritsi.

Stick with English (Latin) letters.

I think that it's great you are pushing yourself to learn new things, but with languages it is essential that what you are memorizing and learning is actually accurate. And the only way to do that (like IGWARG demonstrates) is from a teacher, and not from Google Translate.

Despite what Silicon Valley would have us believe, accurate machine translation is not possible (and probably won't be for quite a while).

Cyrillic all the way !

Igwarg1 the regiments are listed in a Nafziger OOB
for the Battle of Krem / Durstein, Oct 30, 1805. Since Google translate isn't up to the task what source would you suggest I use? I see the forum doesn't like Cyrillic lettering.

I am not a Napoleonic expert, so I don't know the sources. Russian is my native language. Just stick with English.

Also, grenadier lookig figures in top picture have label that I can translate "get real drunk". Jagers on the bottom have correct label for jagers.

Another vote in favor of Cyrillic!

Do it, but only if you can be accurate.

It's got to be Cyrillic

You have to be a little crazy to be a wargamer & if this amuses you, you should do it.

Ditto.

Just be prepared to have the genitive in each description,

Major,

Of course they should be in Cyrillic.
Here are the correct Russian names, as they would have been written in the era (old spelling, punctuation, word order, capitalization etc.). IGWARG, do correct any errors, please.

8-й Егерскій полкъ
Малороссійскій Гренадерскій полкъ
Смоленскій Мушкетерскій полкъ
Лейбъ-Кирасирскiй ЕЯ ВЕЛИЧЕСТВА полкъ

Next we have transliteration for English-language speakers. This is not translation. It is an attempt to render the sound of the Russian words in LAtin charaacters in a way that will cause English speakers to pronounce them correctly. It would be different if the target was French or German speakers.
There are several rules or methods to do this.
See : link
In my opinion, the best resutls are from using the method developed by the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use and generally known as "British Standard".
link
I use the following conventions for optional items:
(i) render Russian ё as "yo"
(ii) render Russian word endings such as -ий and -ый with two Latin letters (i.e. without simplification)
(iii) omit the apostrophes for Russian ъ
(iv) use the apostrophe for Russian ь
(v) omit any optional digraphs
For the above, we get :

8-y Yegerskiy polk
Malorossiyskiy Grenaderskiy polk
Smolenskiy Mushketerskiy polk
Leyb-Kirasirskiy EYA VELICHESTVA polk

Lastly, we have translation into English:

8th Jager regiment
Little Russia Grenadier regiment (could also be "Ukriane")
Smolensk Musketeer regiment
Her Majesty's Life-Cuirassier regiment

As to the grammatical case for the names, a label would be overal именительный / imenitel'nyy / nominative …. but words acting as modifers would be other cases, as shown.

- Sasha

P.S. There is a modern (and I think free) font "LazurskiC" that pretty close to a typical Russian printer's type for the era 1800-1850. It is surprisingly modern looking, but really quite close.
If you want these labels to be as hand-witten or painted, you have another issue – the Russians would use an "italic" or even "cursive" alphabet, which looked quite different.

I will see if using the forum's italic mark-up function does anything to Russian:

8-й Егерскій полкъ
Малороссійскій Гренадерскій полкъ
Смоленскій Мушкетерскій полкъ
Лейбъ-Кирасирскiй ЕЯ ВЕЛИЧЕСТВА полкъ

OK …. that works and does show italic Russian for a Mac in both Firefox and Safari browsers, all set to the default UTF-8 encoding.

Lastly, here is a chart for 19th century Russian cursive:
link

By the way, no one can read hand-written Russian cursive. Russians – including my wife – claim that they can, but they are lying. Really. A person might be able to read their own hand-writing in cursive, but usually not even that.

You don't speak Russian and probably none of your players are going to speak Russian; I find it to be a needless complication.

"needless complication."

Yes, but I see a label like a flag – as a symbol, a distinctive mark.

It is not like he will be having the Russian players using rules in Russian, or writing their victory conditions in Russian.
:-)

- Sasha

definately cyrillic

79th--sure, but if nothing else, miniatures gaming is all about atmosphere and flavor. A little more special sauce never hurt… :-)

I do agree – it's a complication to us Latin Alphabet users, for sure; but a lot of flavour and fun too!
(IMHO)

Although Cyrillic would be nice, most of not all Russian officers spoke and used French. So that would support you using Latin characters with French titles.

Heck, even Wellington and Blucher spoke French to each other when they met after Waterloo.

Jim

Getting the names right in idiomatic period French as almost as hard as getting them right in Russian!

Let's try it like this ….

8e régiment de chasseurs-à-pied
régiment de la Petite-Russie grenadiers
régiment de Smolensk mousquetaires
régiment garde-du-corps de la Impératrice or régiment de cuirassiers gardes-du-corps de la Impératrice

It is a little bit not-quite-right. The place-names look like actual locations of origin in French. They are not, and do not read that way in Russian. Modern French would try something like "régiment Smolensky", but not in the era.

A common error, in the era, would be this : "régiment de la Impératrice cuirassiers de la garde" or "régiment de cuirassiers de la garde de la Impératrice". The Russian "Life" regiments ** were not in the guards, just distinguished. This regiment did not get promoted to the guards until 1856. But assuming that a "Life" regiment of the Empress was in the guard would have been natural for the French.

** except the Life-Cossack formations, which *were* in the guards but whose officers and men were not in the army, but instead in their Cossack hosts, and so did not enjoy guards (social) rank and pay distinctions

- Sasha

Ya gavaroo (ochen?) malenkee parooskee. But, Russian for the most part is a very phonetic language, and forgiving in a lot of respects to word order, quite the antithesis of French, for example.

As long as you know the sounds of the 30ish letters, and when to use the hard and soft sound, spelling and writing Russian is not difficult. For example, it is much easier for me to pronounce a Russian word, written in Russian, then if written in English (I had to think about the first sentence a bit.)

When I took Russian, many years ago, my teacher told me by the end of the first class, I would be able to read/pronounce(not comprehend of course) just about any Russian word, and for the most part, she was correct! But like English, there is just SO much vocabulary.

Take a look at a website listing the alphabet. Once you recognize the look of the letters, pairing with their existing Latin/Germanic counterparts, it is not too bad. There are some sounds that just do not translate either way. The "J" sound, for example, is quite uncommon in the world, and Russians usually replace it with the sound "dzha". So "John", for example, might be pronounced as da'zan.

But the Russian letter "X", does not have a nice, smooth English translation.

I think it is the look of the symbols which is most intimidating.

ilodic

As a Russian/Prussian aficionado I've never tried the Russian English letter spelling yet alone the Cyrillic version. But have kept OOB's for my Prussians in their German spellings at times. I label my units by numbers but do label my Russian cavalry by letters by English spellings such as Moscow Dragoons (MD). My only reservation would be if other people would have to decipher your labels, if only the opponents why not?

Out of curiosity is the romanized version of Grenadier is Grenaderskiy why is Google giving me Grenaderskogo? It also gives me Gusarskogo for Hussar, would it be Gusarskiy?

My brain hurts…

You have "grenaderskiy polk" when it is the subject of the sentence, the nominative case, and masculine singular ("polk-" is masculine).
You would have "grenaderskaya rota" for "grenadier company", since "rot-" is feminine.
It is "grenaderskoe" for neuter singular, but I can't think of a common example.
link

The "-ogo" ending is for when you a describing another noun, the genitive case (masculine or neuter singular).
Example : "kapitan grenaderskogo polka" for "captain of [the/a] grenadier regiment"
And for feminine singular : "kapitan grenaderskoy roty" for "captain of [the/a] grenadier company"
link

This is called declension, I think. Anyway, we don't have it much in English, except for singular/plural and a few special cases like pronouns (he/him).
And we don't do gender except for proper nouns and direct Latin imports.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

Under the old spelling, it was "grenaderskago".
An "a" and an "o" in the middle of a word like that sounds about the same, if you speak in the style of urbanites, especially in Moscow or Petersburg.
A common example, "хорошо" / "khorosho" / "good" or "fine" or, informally, "agreed" or "OK".
This, you would think, would be said like "khor-row-show". However, in the major cities, you hear "hah-rah-show" or even "hah-rah-sha".
Because of this, under the old spelling, pre-Revolution, it was "a" instead of "o" in some words.

By the way, this declension stuff is much easier to remember and to do more or less correctly once you can do it in Cyrillic. Your brain gets kinda wired for it. But it is a pain in the *** to try to remember how it goes while writing English in Latin characters.

- Sasha

The fun thing about Google Translate is that you can use it to come up with Russian slogans for the side of tanks that look credible, but are ahistorical and there for your own amusement.

A check that they are roughly correct is to take the output language and put it into another translation engine to see if you get the original phrase back.

As tuscaloosa says, machine translation isn't there yet. But for a mere wargames unit where it's adding atmosphere, it is good enough.

So I will eventually have WW2 Russian tanks bearing slogans such as "Вы чертовски со мной разговаривать" ("are you ****ing talking to me?"), "Разве вы пролили свое пиво?" ("did you spill my pint?"), "Игра окончена. вставьте монету" ("game over. insert coin"), "закрой свой рот и посмотрите на мой пыж" ("shut your mouth and look at my wad"), and my personal favourite, "Вы говорите мне , или вы жевательной кирпич" ("are you talking to me or chewing a brick").

Probably to a native speaker these read like the assembly instructions on a Japanese model kit, but they look right on a tank…

"You talk to me or you are chewing brick." :)

I can just see writing in "Kerensky Fusiliers" and what comes out, in Cyrillic, is "my hovercraft is full of eels".

Àðçàìàññêèé äðàãóíñêèé ïîëê -Arzamas Dragoon Regiment
from
link
A link of Russian OOB from Borodino
or Êåêñãîëüìñêèé ïåõîòíûé ïîëê -Kexholm Inf Regt
Seems if nothing else adding a lot of letters to print out my OOB's. Last year was sort of working with a Russian immigrant, and asked him how he wrote home. He said he had a program that translated a English keyboard to a Russian Alphabet. Talked about a little history but he was more interested in WWII and while I find it fascinating as well am more into Napoleonic.
P.S. So I find my little experiment of copying and pasting it copy's to the comment box but sending to the page it changes it.

Latin letters.

The Cyrillic is too long to write out, has to be declined properly and is a pain to read. (I can read Russian unit designations in the original, but I'm an English speaker and I work in English so to do so is a major pain.)

Oh, and good luck getting the old letters and old town names you need after the modern language revisions. You risk having anachronistic modern Russian, rather than the old Russian you presumably seek. As pointed out above, it you handwrite you have to use the cursive letters, not the printed versions. And the old cursive versions too, not the modern ones, because they've changed too.

And then, because you can't speak Russian, you will pronounce them all incorrectly anyway. Which is why the rest of us call it Moscow rather than butchering the original.

Well here goes. Here is a list of the units I want to "raise", and label. I have them in Latin characters.

Bryanskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
Narvskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
8-y Yegerskiy polk.
6-y Yegerskiy polk.
Sysoyev Kazachi polk.
Moskovskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
Vyatkskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
Novgorodskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
Butyrskskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
Mariupolskiy Gusarskskiy polk.
Malorossiyskiy Grenaderskiy polk.
Yaroslavskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
Smolenskiy Mushketerski polk.
Chernigovskiy Dragunskiy polk.
Kievskiy Grenaderskiy polk.
Azovskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
Podolskiy Mushketerskiy polk.
Leyb-Kirasirskiy EYA VELICHESTVA polk.
Pavlogradskiy Gusarskiy polk.

I have aslo seen the iy endings written as ii, so Smolenskiy or Smolenskii.

Give me time to climb into my funk hole…

Донской Казачій подполковника Сысоева 1-го полкъ
Donskoy Kazachiy podpolkovnika Sysoeva 1-go polk
Donskoy Kazachiy Sysoeva 1-go polk
Donskoy Kazachiy Sysoeva polk
The last of these is OK because there was only this "Sysoev" regiment in the field. Often the number (it is counting the number of Sysoev's) is needed to avoid confusion.

"Mariupolskiy Gusarskskiy polk" has a typo. It should be "Gusarskiy"

The -ий word ending can be transliterated as -ii or -iy or -y for English speakers.
It is really a question of "style" in transliteration. All three are fine, as long as you are consistent.

You seem to have elected to omit any transliteration for both hard sign ъ and soft sign ь . Again, a question of style. Just remember to be consistent if you add units later.

Very nice!

- Sasha

If you want to use latin letters that can be worked with, Cyrillic would be counter productive IMO. We label our units so we can uniquely identify them. How are your fellow gamers going to identify the units to each other if they can't phonetically read the names? "Go charge that regiment with the trident for the first letter." "Move the jagers that end with PI into the town."

My generation remembers enamels from Humbrol. Hours to dry…..couldn't really do shading.

Acrylic every time for me. I cannot understand what the fuss is about………

I must be missing the point. Has to be Acrylic, but you need to check your spelling….

oooops!
I missed a typo :

"Vyatkskiy" should be "Vyatskiy"

- Sasha

Should Butyrskskiy then be Butyrskiy?

Sasha I am afraid I cannot take claim for the transliteration. I was "Googling" Russian regimental names with skiy endings, to see if the regiments popped up, spelt with those endings. While being surprisingly sucessful I discovered a site with all the names translated into latin letters, but with varient spellings, such as Malorossiiskii for Little Russia.

Is Batareinaya the correct term / spelling for a postion (heavy) battery? Konno baterei for horse artillery?

Thank you very much for all your, as well as everyone else's, help and suggestions.

Ok now you have me very interested. I thankfully am working mostly from the Borodino OOB with sadly only a few replacements. I could work with the Russian link above and have found I can copy, paste and print in my Word document and it comes out exactly as the site. I use letter designations for my all cavalry, Guard and Grenadier infantry. My musketeers get a home number system 1 was first painted and 21 is what I'm working on. Jagers get their original numbers. I started copying the Russian version next to the English on my Word sheet. The good thing is I would do this for my own tortured amusement.

"Butyrskiy" – yes, sorry. Proof-reading is not my special skill.

"Malorossiiskii" – they are using -ii for Russian -ий (old spelling -iй) . As noted above, this choice is just fine. Also OK is -y and -iy . Just be consistent. I use -iy, but you don't have to. The two letters (and other combinations of a vowel + й) are essentially monosyllabic. In Polish, a related language, the word ending is a simple -i (and they use Latin characters!). In both Russian and Polish, the sound is a long e, such as in "thee". The reason that you don't see Russian -ий (old spelling -iй) rendered as -i is that it looks like Polish that way. So pick one of -ii, -iy or -y for transliterating Russian.

Phonetically, the name would be a little like "mah-lah-roh-seez-kee", with the ending voiced less than the first three syllables.
(Native speakers – if your English is better than my Russian, please do correct me!)

Examples for artillery companies, old Russian spelling (notice the -iй-, which I render as -iy- ) ….
8-я конная артиллерiйская рота / 8-ya konnaya artilleriyskaya rota
12-я батарейная артиллерийская рота / 12-ya batareynaya artilleriyskaya rota
24-я легкая артиллерийская рота / 24-ya legkaya artilleriyskaya rota

Other period forms, if you already knew you were looking at artillery companies :
легкая рота № 2-я / legkaya rota № 2-ya.
батарейная № 4-я рота / batareynaya № 4-ya rota

These are the nominiative singular "declension", or whatever you call it …. it is the form for use on a label.

Major, I salute your efforts here – you are really getting the hang of how Russians named their units.
I promise you that I picked up what little I have of Russian without active study – except for study of Russian women, ending with my marrying one, and the study of Russian military history.
:-)

- Sasha

14Bore,

On a Mac, the whole thing is by default in UTF-8 encoding. Works virtually anywhere. You can select as many keyboard layouts as you want, and cycle them by hitting the "command" and "space" keys at the same time. If you like you can have a little flag displayed in the upper left of the screen to remind you what language you've got.
command+space : аауцкиааццши
command+space : fjreifhuehvejbe
Easy as can be.

Russian Macs (very high Russian retail prices) usually come with physical keys that show both Cyrillic and Latin. You can also have little Cyrillic letters etched onto the a standard Latin keyboard. My wife has this for hers, done by a Petersburg University student co-operative for $20 USD and a 6-pack of beer, while you wait.

Of course, she does not actually use the nice Mac fonts to leave messages for me. She writes on paper, in pencil, in a rather old-fashioned Russian cursive – and no one (I mean no one, including her, and least of all me) can read the scribble that results.
When my driver or his wife or my daughter hands one of these notes to me, we can't help laughing out loud as we all try to read the dang thing, or just try to guess what it was that the "sudarynya" * wanted.
:-)

- Sasha

* сударыня – obsolete Russian honorific for a woman, originally a female judge or law-giver (or more likely the wife of such) in south Russian dialect : суд / sud / court . It gets the idea of SWMBO nicely into Russian.

I'd go with whatever suits your players …

I don't speak Russian but my schoolboy Greek means I'm generally OK with Cyrillic text (and I'm sure if they want to, players will get it pretty quickly) …

Otherwise, print the labels out in both versions …

Phil

I've made myself a English to Russian translation page with all my units and Generals. Even if I don't re-label any units I am finding it a fascinating exercise.
The only units I don't have maybe in their correct names are the Chasseurs a' Cheval and the Guard sapper battalion. These are the only two units post Borodino I have. Actually I have a few composite chasseur/dragoon units with figures of each in them. On these two units I typed in and had my translator tell me what they were in Russian but can't be totally sure this is correct. Any help would be appreciated.

Here you go (with old Russian spelling) ….

December 1812
Лейбъ-Гвардіи Саперный баталiонъ / Leyb-Gvardii Sapernyy batalion / Life-Guard Sapper battalion
Нѣжинскій Конно-Егерскіе полкъ / Nezhinskiy Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Nizhyn Horse-Jager regiment *
Черниговскій Конно-Егерскіе полкъ / Chernigovskiy Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Chernihiv Horse-Jager regiment *
Арзамасскій Конно-Егерскіе полкъ / Arzamasskiy Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Arzamas Horse-Jager regiment
Лифляндскій Конно-Егерскіе полкъ / Liflyandskiy Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Livonia Horse-Jager regiment
Сѣверскій Конно-Егерскіе полкъ / Severskiy Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Seversk Horse-Jager regiment
Переяславскій Конно-Егерскіе полкъ / Pereyaslavskiy Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Pereyaslavl Horse-Jager regiment **
Тираспольскій Конно-Егерскіе полкъ / Tiraspol'skiy Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Ternopil Horse-Jager regiment *
Дерптскій Конно-Егерскіе полкъ / Derptskiy Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Dorpat Horse-Jager regiment

* Place-names are given in the translation as currently used in English, and so reflects modern names in Ukrainian. One might also just use the transliterated version of the place-name in the translated version, such as "Nezhinskiy Horse-Jager regiment", or the Russian language version of the place-name, such as "Nezhin Horse-Jager regiment".
** Place-name up to 1943, in English it is "Pereiaslav" today.

April 1814
Лейбъ-Гвардіи Конно-Егерскій полкъ / Leyb-Gvardii Konno-Yegerskiy polk / Life-Guard Horse-Jager regiment

January 1819
Лейбъ-Гвардіи Конно-Пiонерный эскадронъ / Leyb-Gvardii Konno-Pionernyy eskadron / Life-Guard Horse-Pioneer squadron

- Sasha

Thanks a million.
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