Back In The CCCP
mong the the world’s writing systems,
the one closest to the Roman alphabet we
use for English would probably be the
Greek alphabet. It’s pretty close, especially
if you look at the capital letters. Their “Α”
is the same as our A, just as Κ, Μ, Ν, and Τ
are also the same as their Roman
counterparts.
On the other hand, the Greek letter “Η” is
pronounced “eh”, and “Ρ” is said like our R.
(Greek uses “Π” for the P sound.) “B”,
meanwhile, used be said as B but now
sounds more like V.
The Cyrillic alphabet, used in Russian and
a few other languages, also has letters in
common with the Roman alphabet. The
alphabet’s inventors, St. Cyril and St.
Methodius, based their creation on Greek
writing, so — just like in Greek — А, K, М,
and Т are all read the same or almost the
same as they would be in English. But
there are similarly misleading letters:
“Р” = R
(like in Greek, they use “П” for P)
“Н” = N
“В” = V
(they use “Б” for B)
And meanwhile, “С” is always pronounced
like an S. As a result of all this, the Russian
word for “restaurant” is written:
ΡЕСТОРАН
which looks like it should be pronounced
“pek-to-paw” but is actually “ree-stuh-
rahn”.
During the Cold War, most non-Russian
speakers could recognize “СССР” on the
side of Soviet rockets, This is the Cyrillic
version of “U.S.S.R.,” the abbreviation of
“Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. The
first “C” stood for “Soyuz” (Союз), which
means “Union”, followed by “C” for “Soviet”
(Soviet-skee), “C” for “Socialist” (Sotzialist-
eecheskee), and “P” – the Cyrillic R – for
“Republics” (Respooblikee).
Cyrillic also has some letters that look like
mirror images of Roman figures. For
example, the “backwards R”
Я
is pronounced “ya.” It’s the last letter of
the Cyrillic alphabet, and in Russian it
means the first-person pronoun “I”.
Meanwhile, “backwards N”
И
is also a vowel, pronounced as “ee”. By
itself, it means “and”.
o all this may be a little confusing for
those who grew up on the Roman
alphabet, but really it’s far, far easier than
the Cherokee script, as you’ll see in a
moment.
Most native North American languages
didn’t have their own writing system when
the Europeans arrived, so they just
adopted the Roman alphabet for their own
use. Even the Aztec language — Nahuatl —
and some of the Mayan languages, which
did have their own writing systems, ended
up with Roman letters.
There are some exceptions. Many of the
aboriginal languages spoken in Canada,
including Cree and Inuit, use a special
syllabary (syllable-alphabet) invented in
the 1800s. As an example, the Cree word
for “Cree” is written:
ᐃᔨᔫᒡ
But perhaps the most famous Native
American writing system is the one used
for Cherokee. It was developed by the
silversmith and linguist Sequoyah, who
had each letter stand for a syllable in his
language. The forms of many of the letters
were loosely based on those in the Roman
and Greek alphabets, so that a good
number of Cherokee letters look just like
Roman ones.
However, the sounds for those letters are
totally unrelated to what they are in Latin,
Greek, English or any other language,
since Sequoyah didn’t read any of the
European languages. So for instance:
Ꭰ
is pronounced “ah”
Ꮇ
is pronounced “loo”
Ꮋ
is pronounced “mee”
There are also distinctions between
Roman-looking letters that don’t exist in
English. So,
Ꮃ
is “lah”, but
Ꮤ
is “tah”, even though both just look like
different forms of “W” to English speakers.
And of course Cherokee also has many
letters that look nothing like those in
European writing systems, such as
Ꭶ
“gah”
Ꮨ
“tee”
Ꮰ
“tlo”