Just watched Elektra and I’m not going to get into the merits or demerits of that movie. One thing I did notice that sparked off the peeve detector was the substitution of several greek (upper and lower case) charaters for the non-equivalent roman characters. Examples: lowercase rho for lower case p, uppercase sigma for upper case E, uppercase lambda for a capital A. I don’t mind if they’re going to at least use the phonetic equivalents (use phi for a ph or f sound; the lower alphas, deltas and taus were at least done okay. Unralated characters are distracting.
Likewise the use of the backwards R (pronounced “ya”, in russian), for the roman R in an attempt to look cool/authentic in Russian themed movie titles, just drives me around the bend.
Does anyone else get distracted by this sort of thing, or even notice?
I tend to notice but not care too too much. Unless I already dislike the movie, in which case I’ll use it as further support for its suckiness in my eyes.
Ooh, that practice really gets up my nose! Take this perfectly good historical fiction book for children by Gloria Whelan. It takes place in Russia, so the publishers just had to screw up the cover by spelling the A’s with Russian D’s.
The ‘ya’ thing drives me crazy too. I have a CD by Boris Grebenshikov upon which all the R’s are backwards. It’s not cool and edgy! It’s lame!
OTOH, in the Asterix comics the script is written differently for Greeks–everything is more angular and the E’s are sigmas, and it doesn’t bug me. It’s done for several different nationalities, though I can’t remember the others. Maybe because I was a kid when I started reading them?
Heh…reminds me of the time I got the Billy Joel Concert CD (from his Russian concert). The title is in Cyrillic script and for the longest time I wondered what the hell “KOHUEPT” meant.
The use of “Ya” in place of an R to look Russian has always annoyed me since I first learned the least little bit about the Cyrillic alphabet. Less frequently seen, but just as bothersome, is when the Cyrillic “I” character, which looks like a backwards N, is used in place of N.
I’ve also seen something recently in which a Sigma was used in place of E.
On the subject of the Heavy Metal Umlaut: An old friend of mine was in a metal garage band called “Tork”. The umlaut was over the R. Which was not backwards, by the way.
Funny, this recently came up on MusicBrainz (the music id site). They have a master list of artists, and someone changed Korn to Ko?n (because that’s how the band does it). The Russian-speakers were particularly unhappy, because it’s not pronounced like that if you can actually read the cyrillic letters.
Yeah, the graphic designers for the game are just as guilty of this crap as the rest of the title designers in the world. It is probably better spelled ТЭТРИС. And yes, it is “Toys Ya Us”, at least in my head.
I cannot count the number of times you have already said what I was going to say in a thread.
I wrote my name in Cyrillic for my friend, and she laughed and said it looked like “Ann Pafeptn”. That’s how she pronounced it. I laughed. This is irrelevant, I know.
There is also the restaurant, Mega Wyaips. And I hear there’s a bad band called Koyan!
