I’m not sure whether to put this in GQ or Cafe Society, but since it’s a question about the DVD release of a film, I’ll put it here:
As already mentioned on this board, the upcoming DVD release of Borat is cleverly designed to look like a bootleg direct from Kazakhstan- underneath the English slipcover is a case (which can be seen here) made to look poorly photocopied and written in Cyrillic. Are the Cyrillic words legit, or are they gibberish?
Actual words, in Russian - surprisingly, since as a rule the segments on his series used only Cyrillic gibberish. It’s basically a description written “in character” starting off with “Official ministry of information of Kazakhstan presents 4th most famous Kazakh journalist…”. That’s all I was willing to bother my Ukrainian friend to translate for me.
Not the title, that’s faked from real Cyrillic letters to be readable in English. But you knew that.
The rest is legit, though: The label on the left says “Additional Material”, and the one in the lower right means “(Something not in my Russian dictionary) film-comedy classic”.
YMMV.
Is very nice! Thanking you for all your kind responses!
If I had a better picture of the DVD insert, I could probably translate it. As has been said, it appears to be Russian as opposed to Kazakh. Kazakh is very similar to Russian alphabetically but differs in declensions, conjugations, vowel stresses, etc. None of which seem apparent from the cover. The most interesting thing I find about Russian is that a lot of people do not realize that there are a great many cognates which are very similar to English, but you wouldn’t know since the alphabet completely changes the look of the word. Restaurant, for example, is spelled ‘PECTOPAH’. P is R, C is S, H is N. It can be very disconcerting to reassociate the sounds of established Latin letters to the different sounds in Slavic languages. Personally, I think it’s one of the hardest aspects of reading/learning Russian, and vice versa for Russians learning English.
The actual title would be Борат in Russian, rather than the gibberish version on the DVD. If you were to pronounce the DVD title phoenetically, it would basically be “Vwoyadt”. The B character forms a soft [voiceless] “vweh” sound when preceding most vowels. Think of Chekov from Star Trek trying to say “vessel”, but it comes out “fwessel” or “vwessel”. The reversed R is a “ya” sound, and the A-looking character is a D. The reversed N you often see in American-gibberish Russian (i.e. when Discovery Channel does a special on Russian History and spells it with a big Soviet-style block font with a reversed N) is actually a long E sound. Similarly, the squared W character is a “sh” sound, the Y is actually a long “ooh” sound, and the character resembling an unbound staple is a P, no doubt having it’s etymological roots in the Greek character pi. The evolution of symbology in Slavic languages is as interesting to me as that of early English and the Gaelic languages from northern Europe and it’s fascinating to see how the two branches of language share common ancestry dating back hundreds of years. The current Cyrillic alphabet, despite undergoing a lot more changes than the Latin alphabet, seems truer to the roots of its ancestors than Latin and Germanic languages. On the other hand, it’s also a bit of a mess because each country in that region of the world insists on doing things its own way, even with regards to their alphabets. I suppose this comes as no surprise since they all seemingly want to kill each other.
[hijacks]
I’ve heard this said many times by people who don’t speak Russian, and I’ve never understood it. Three weeks into my first-year Russian course, all the students without exception had the alphabet down pat and could more or less pronounce (but not understand) any Russian word. The case declensions, stress patterns, and especially verbal aspects were way way harder to get down.
Also Kazakh is a completely different, unrelated language of the Turkic family that shares an alphabet with Russian, and has a fairly large number of Russian loanwords, but is otherwise about as close to Russian as it is to English.
[/hijacks]
If anyone’s interested, the back cover says
"Official Ministry of Information of Kazakhstan presents a film of Borat Sagdiev, fourth most famous Kazakh journalist. See his travels in the U, S, and A [yes, they repeat the joke in Russian!] and how he learns about the greatest country in the world. He meets many many people in the famous country of democracy and pornography. Borat learns to drive a car, follow etiquette, flush a toilet, and how to court a sexually appealing, yellow-haired woman, Pamela Andersen. Since the film contains vulgar swearing, pointless use of force and violence, and also close-up views of a male Bishkek, this film may not be appropriate for children younger than three. We wish you satisfaction!
Additional material
Censored scenes/Global advertising [campaign? = turne]/Musical trailer"
That is interesting, because I understand and can read it without getting confused. Doesn’t change the fact that when first starting out, one has to get used to mentally switching alphabets from English to Russian and it can be disconcerting. These aren’t the only languages with similar characters making different sounds, and this means there’s at least some time and practice needed to adjust. Three weeks is certainly more than enough, particularly in a Russian course, much less learning to read the language on your own terms. Considering I don’t even use the Russian language particularly often, I consider it an accomplishment to know about it at all. I suppose when I go take a course one day, I won’t even need three minutes to read or understand most words, so to each his own.
It’s also interesting that Khazak is as close to Russian as Russian is to English, even though the two share an alphabet which isn’t the one used for English. By this logic, the English spoken in America and the English spoken in Scotland could probably be considered two different Germanic languages too, but let’s not split hairs. I’ve heard people from Brazil say this about Portugese and Spanish more than a few times, yet knowing some Spanish I’m able to understand a surprising amount of the words said in Portugese despite never having studied it in my life. Yes, languages are different, but when they essentially share an alphabet and common ancestry, they also share a degree of mutual comprehension.
erm… no, no they don’t. Many Kazakhs speak Russian as well as their native language, but someone who only speaks Russian will not understand Kazakh, not even a little bit.
English and Russian are much closer to each other than either is to Kazakh. It’s universally accepted that English and Russian have a common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European. Kazakh is a Turkic language; unless you give credit to the Nostratic hypothesis, Kazakh and Russian do not have a common ancestor. Go to the main page of the Kazakh Wikipedia and see if you can understand any of it. I speak fluent Russian, and I couldn’t understand any of it. Only a few international words like Энциклопедия (encyclopedia) were recognizable.
Heh, no, it doesn’t make sense, if you’re reading it as you would Russian, but they still share an alphabet which is more similar to one another than they are to a Latin alphabet. Khazaks speak Russian because it’s a neutral language of commerce in that region of the world in the same way English is throughout most of the rest of the world. I’m thinking more in terms of the history of the alphabets; how they evolved and where they borrow from … not so much for the languages themselves, which I realize are different. Someone who doesn’t know Cyrillic couldn’t begin to read either Russian or Kazakh, but any Romance language or even old-world English would be cake, pronunciations nothwithstanding.
Anyone up for a comparitive discussion of ancient Sumerian vs. Aramaic? Chinese vs. Korean? Hebrew vs. Arabic? Latin vs. Pig Latin?
English and Basque share an alphabet, but they certainly aren’t close languages. English and Russian are much closer to each other than either is to Basque. Really, when comparing languages, whether they use the same alphabet in their written form is actually a very minor thing.
Timchik: if Kazakh is a Turkic language, I guess it has some relation to modern Turkish. How close are these two languages, if you know?
Who knew Kazakhstan was such a hotbed for journalism- Borat is their sixth most famous person, but only fourth most famous journalist. 
So? So what if they share an alphabet? I don’t mean to sound hostile, but the alphabet a language uses has no relation to how close one language is to another. English uses the same alphabet as Italian, Basque, Polish, etc.* but you can’t say they’re related to English linguistically just because of the alphabet.
Damn, I missed my edit window. Adding this disclaimer:
** Yes, I know that when you go back far enough, they will be related. But I’m just saying you can’t say that, say, Estonian is close to English just because of the alphabet, when there are other languages that could be closer linguistically, alphabet be damned.
Sorry to reply again, but I had another way of thinking about it:
There’s nothing (in theory, not in practice) stopping the English language from switching over to using the Cyrillic alphabet, with some modifications in pronunciation (and obviously spelling ;)). So if that happened, does that mean that English would suddenly be more closely related (linguistically) to Khazak, just because now they use the same alphabet? The grammar, conjugations, etc. would remain the same. Hell, we could just invent a brand new alphabet that no one’s used before. Does that mean it’s not closely related to any other languages anymore?
For that matter, within the past 100 or so years, Kazakh has also been written using the Arabic and Roman alphabets rather than Cyrillic, and the Arabic alphabet is still apparently used to write it in some places. For that matter, the same is true of numerous languages of the former Soviet Union that are now written in Cyrillic.
Heck, another Turkic language of the former Soviet Union, Azerbaijani, is still in the same boat: it was written in the Arabic alphabet in the Russian Empire before the Russian Revolution, then the Soviets switched it to the Latin alphabet, then to Cyrillic, and now independent Azerbaijan has just switched back to the Latin alphabet. Meanwhile, the Azeris of contiguous areas of Iran have continued using the Arabic alphabet to write in Azerbaijani throughout the entire period. Does anyone here really think the difference in alphabets fundamentally changed the language, particularly when there are tons of existing materials still in the other 2 remaining alphabets close at hand? Or that the Azeris in contiguous areas of Iran across the border from Azerbaijan are using a fundamentally different language?
Just out of curiosity I looked this up. I knew that the Oghuz Turkic languages ( Turkish, Azeri, Turkmenstani, etc. ) were all mutually intelligible, but apparently ALL Turkic languages are:
Kazakh and the other Turkic languages are closely related to one another, and there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility among them.
From here: http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?LangID=60&menu=004
Cool, thanks!