Volapuk encoding (
RussianRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
: кодировка "волапюк",
kodirovka "volapyuk") is a slang term for rendering the letters of the
Cyrillic alphabetThe Cyrillic script writing system isan alphabet developed in the First Bulgarian Empire, and used in the Slavic national languages of Russian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and...
with
LatinThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.During the...
ones. Unlike
TranslitTranslit is a method of encoding Cyrillic letters with Latin ones. The term is derived from transliteration, the system of replacing letters of one alphabet with letters of another....
(in which characters are replaced
to sound the same), in volapuk characters can be replaced
to look or sound the same.
Etymology
The name
Volapuk encoding comes from the
VolapükVolapük is a constructed language, created in 1879–1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Volapük conventions took place in 1884 , 1887 and 1889 . The first two conventions used...
constructed languageA planned or constructed language—known colloquially or informally as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary have been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
, for two reasons. Cyrillic text written in this way looks strange and often funny, just as a Volapük-language text may appear. At the same time, the word "Volapük" ("Волапюк/Воляпюк"
Volapyuk/Volyapyuk in Russian) itself
sounds funnyWords may be considered inherently funny, for reasons ranging from onomatopoeia to phonosemantics. Such words have been used by a range of influential comedians, including W. C...
to Russian ears, so the name stuck.
History
Volapuk and
TranslitTranslit is a method of encoding Cyrillic letters with Latin ones. The term is derived from transliteration, the system of replacing letters of one alphabet with letters of another....
have been in use since the early days of the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
to write
e-mailElectronic mail, often abbreviated as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use...
messages and other texts in Russian where the support of Cyrillic fonts was limited: either the sender did not have a keyboard with Cyrillic letters or the receiver did not necessarily have Cyrillic screen fonts. In the early days, the situation was aggravated by a number of mutually incompatible computer encodings for the Cyrillic alphabet, so that the sender and receiver were not guaranteed to have the same one. Also, the 7-bit character
encodingA character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
of the early days was an additional hindrance.
Some Russian e-mail providers even included Volapuk encoding in the list of available options for the e-mails routed abroad, e.g.,
- "MIME/BASE64, MIME/Quoted-Printable, volapuk, uuencode"
By the late 90s, the encoding problem had been almost completely resolved, due to increasing support from software manufacturers and Internet service providers. Volapuk still maintains a level of use for SMS text messages, because it is possible to fit more characters in a latinized SMS message than a unicode one.
Rules
Volapuk often replaces Cyrillic letters with Latin ones in order
to look the same as typed or handwritten Cyrillic letters.
- Replace "the same" letters: a, e, K, M, T, o, y. Capitalize when necessary for closer resemblance (к: K better than k, м: M better than m (which looks exactly like 't' in handwritten Cyrillic), т: T better than t).
- Replace similar-looking letters: в - B, г - 2 (handwritten resemblance) or r, з - 3, л - J| or /\ (the last is again handwritten resemblance), н - Н, п - n (handwritten resemblance), р - p, с - c, х - x, ч - 4. This may vary.
- Replace all other non-obvious hard-to-represent characters; there are many options for each letter. (For example, letter 'щ' can be encoded in more than 15 different ways). Examples: ж - *, я - 91, щ - LLI_, э - -) and so on. The choice for each letter depends on the preferences of the individual user.
As some numeric digits are used to represent Cyrillic letters, the result may resemble
leetspeakLeet or eleet , also known as "leetspeak", is an alphabet used primarily on the Internet for the English language. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. The term is derived from the word "elite", and the usage it describes is a specialized form of symbolic...
.
Encoding depends on the language as well. For example,
UkrainianUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
users have their own traditions, distinct from the Russian ones.
Table
- А — A
- Б — 6, b
- В — B
- Г — F, r
- Д — D, g (lowercase)
- Е — E
- Ё — E, E", Ë (latin)
- Ж — *, }I{
- З — 3
- И — N, u (lowercase)
- Й — N', Ñ, u' or ú (both lowercase)
- К — K
- Л — JI, /\
- М — M
- Н — H
- О — O
- П — II, n
- Р — P
- С — C
- Т — T, m (lowercase)
- У — y
- Ф — Ø, qp
- Х — X
- Ц — "U,"
- Ч — 4
- Ш — W, LLI
- Щ — "W," or "W_" or LLL
- Ъ — b or 'b
- Ы — bl
- Ь — b
- Э — ~), € (Euro sign)
- Ю — IO, I-O
- Я — R, 91
Example
- СОВЕТСКИЙ СОЮЗ (Cyrillic) [Soviet Union]
- COBETCKNN COIO3 ("volapuk")
- SOVETSKIY SOYUZ (transliteration)
See also
- Translit
Translit is a method of encoding Cyrillic letters with Latin ones. The term is derived from transliteration, the system of replacing letters of one alphabet with letters of another....
- Russian Chat Alphabet
- Romanization of Russian
Romanization of the Russian alphabet is the process of transliterating the Russian language from the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet...
- Romanization of Ukrainian
The romanization or Latinization of Ukrainian is the representation of the Ukrainian language using Latin letters. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, a variation of Cyrillic....
- Faux Cyrillic
Faux Cyrillic, pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian or faux Russian typography is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia. For example, R and N in RUSSIAN may be replaced by Cyrillic Я and И, giving "ЯUSSIAИ"...
- The reverse, e.g. "ЯUSSIAИ"
- Arabic Chat Alphabet
The [Anglo-]Arabic chat alphabet, along with the analogous Arabisch , The [Anglo-]Arabic chat alphabet, along with the analogous (Teuto-Arabic) Arabisch (in turn, anglicized "Arabish") , The [Anglo-]Arabic chat alphabet, along with the analogous (Teuto-Arabic) Arabisch (in turn, anglicized...
- the same idea in Arabic
- Mojibake
is the happenstance of incorrect, unreadable characters shown when computer software fails to render text correctly according to its associated character encoding.-Causes:...