My Russian class has some writing assignments coming up. Nothing major, but a few short paragraphs, and I thought it might be fun to write them on the computer. I figured finding Cyrillic fonts online would be a snap, but I wasn’t sure about keyboard maps, so I asked my teacher. He explained that the Russian keyboard is oh so different, and implied it wasn’t worth the trouble for all that hunting and pecking.
They are none so blind as they who will not buy a Mac. In 45 seconds of Googling, I had found and downloaded not only Cyrillic fonts, but a keyboard map that roughly corresponds to the Qwerty consonant/vowel array. What’s more, switching back and forth between the two is one click away, thanks to the international standards installed in my lovely laptop.
Oh, and if you want the traditional Russian layout, that’s in there too.
KCK said on October 10, 2003 at 6:10 pm
“I love my Mac” you say.
щнкуйк длвгц укщк лтщг рща
Now where was that ч again, random cyrillic curious if it show up with the right font.
KCK
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Melissa said on October 10, 2003 at 10:42 pm
Go Nance and KCK! My keyboard is not worthy!
Melissa (whose typing skills make spelling correctly difficult even in English)
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Connie said on October 11, 2003 at 12:37 am
Ya panemayoo pa-russky tovaritch. Or is that govareete? That tovaritch (comrade) dates my Russian classes. Not much else I can remember, dosvadanya, pashawlsta, spacibo horoshaw. And I can count to ten. Well, odeen, twa, …pyat, vocem, ok, 1,2,5,8. I think.
Anyway, glad you love your MAC. I ran the Rochester Minnesota public library for three years at the end of the 90s and our internet access PCs were set up to provide various fonts and languages including Russian for our many “visitors” in town from around the world to visit the Mayo Clinic. And yes “visitors is the word used to refer to those who came to town due to the clinic.
In the library profession we talk about CJK computers. These are computers that can speak Chinese, Japanese and Korean to the Worldcat database for libraries that are cataloging books in those languages. Definitely something one would put on their resume. And I know someone here in Elkhart County who is a freelance cataloger specializing in medical books in SLavic languages. She has as much work from all over the country as she can handle.
So there’s an idea for you. What was the Library School when I was at UM is now the School of Information Studies, now housed in what I knew as the engineering building on the corner of the diag near South U. Do they still call it the engineering arch with engineering having moved to North Campus?
Connie
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Nance said on October 11, 2003 at 9:29 am
The library school is now the School of Information, and it is indeed still in West Hall. My first day there — I have a class in SI — I entered on wrong side of the arch and found the department of marine hydrodynamics, or something like that. Basically, it’s the place where they design ships. There was a huge tank that looked like it was part of a water-treatment facility. A professor saw me wandering cluelessly and pointed me in the right direction, but not before giving me a little tour. The tank is actually a testing facility for ship models, several of which were hanging from the rafters — some big suckers, too. He said the larger the model, the better the test data, so they make them huge and then float them in the tank, which has a wave generator that can mimic anything up to hurricane conditions. “It’s also a backup reservoir for the Ann Arbor Fire Department,” he said.
But to answer your question: The plaque on the arch identifies it as the “Denison Arch,” and if people still call it the engineering arch, they haven’t done so to me.
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KCK said on October 11, 2003 at 5:52 pm
I took HS Russian a very long time ago, the Czar and Czarina were still running things as I recall. I can remember about as much as Connie except she can count higher. In the early 90�s I ran computing service and support at a very large university�s College of Humanities, which included the various foreign language departments (along with History, English, Philosophy, Linguistics, Comparative Studies). Chinese was the tough one with thousands of �characters�; a small Xerox minicomputer was used as a dedicated Chinese word processor.
On this computer running WinXP using the Russian fonts was surprisingly easy. Go into the control panel � Regional and Language options � Languages and tell it you want to also use Russian, the fonts (although it�s difficult to tell which font set exactly it was using) were already there, and you can toggle back and forth with hot keys in the applications. A note on fonts though, what someone else sees if you share documents usually depends on the fonts they have, and PC and Mac fonts aren�t usually compatible. I was just randomly poking keys to see what Russian characters pop up on the screen. I can�t spell for sour apples in Russian, but thankfully my computer knows how to spell in English.
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Paul said on October 12, 2003 at 3:40 am
The bit about marine hydrodynamics makes me wish that IU had an engineering school. And a lakefront.
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James Burns said on October 12, 2003 at 10:45 am
“…and PC and Mac fonts aren’t usually compatible…”
Nope. With OSX you can use any font under the sun, both Mac & PC. It’s really great.
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danno said on October 13, 2003 at 3:00 pm
Are you by any chance taking Russian history too?
Peter the Great kicks ass!!! I have a cousin living in Ykaterinaburg now (where the last tsar and fam were slaughtered) starting an english speaking school. I just hope he learns the language enough not to piss off the natives!!
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