Hello all -
I’d appreciate some help with this one, it’s odd.
My girlfriend just came back from Iceland with a T-shirt that reads REYKJAVIK, then below it in Cyrillic:
кунлофм3щл
She asked me what that might mean, as I can sound out Cyrillic (but don’t actually speak a Slavic language that uses it). I read it as “Kunlofmzschl,” which makes no sense to me.
Web searches and Russian-English dictionaries have turned up nothing. There are a lot of permutations of the possible pronounciation that word require accent marks, etc in other languages, so a valid matching string might be out there & I’m not finding it. Is this a Cyrilicized Icelandic word (doesn’t sound it to me)? Someone’s name? A designer? Did an Icelander just think it looks cool, as we had that kanji T-shirt fad in the 80s? Is this a Russified Icelandic place name? A practical joke on tourists?
Any help would be appreciated, we’re both super curious.
Don’t know how much help this is, but the “m” may actually be a “t.” I’ve seen older documents with the M-like tey. I think the Roman T is gradually taking its place. (I could be mistaken in that impression.) Anyway, here’s a site showing the M-looking tey. If it’s your letter, your word be be a slightly more pronounceable “Kunloftzshchl.” And sorry, I don’t have any idea what that might mean.
Wow, I’d never seen that before. As if Russian couldn’t be hard enough to read to begin with! Thanks… however, we’re talking about a very modern, clean font like the one depicted in the left column of your link, and I’m quite certain that that letter’s an M.
Any Icelandic Dopers out there? This just be a marketing trivia question instead of a linguistic one.
A really great place to find all sorts of information about Iceland, is a website called Iceland.com Bulletin Board. It can be reached at:
http://www.chatforum.com/iceland/ubb/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi