Voyez le brick geant que j'examine pres du wharf

[David E. Crawford]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Belianine Valeri" <vbelyanin at MTU.RU>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Friday, 06 December 2002 12:51
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] quick brown fox...



> +В чащах юга жил-был цитрус, да но фальшивый экземпляр.+
> хотя нет букв Ё,Ъ

At least for the above example, the explanation for the missing letters
is as follows:  "Quick brown fox" and similar concoctions such as "voyez
le brick" have their historical origins in teletype operations.  The
mechanical printers had individual print keys for each letter, so when
testing a communication circuit the operators needed an
easily-remembered and -typed phrase in order to exercise each key.  The
more common Russian TTY machines use 5-bit baudot code with a third
shift sequence, which allows for 78 possible alpha text characters.
This is not quite enough to totally cover both the Roman and Cyrillic
alphabets without losing some other symbols/etc. that somebody decided
were important enough to keep.  To make up for the shortfall some
similar characters were combined, so E is used to represent both ye and
yo, soft sign is used to represent both soft and hard signs, and 4 is
used to represent both 4 and che.  So, in a radiogram transmitted on a
Russian TTY circuit, you'll never see a yo, hard sign, or che.  The
system is still in use today, mostly by the Russian merchant fleet for
shortwave ship-shore communications.  There are of course a wide variety
of more-modern text messaging systems without this limitation.

On another subject, can anyone point me to a reference that explains why
in Russia there are (still) both oblasts and krays and what their
historical and present differences are?  The web wasn't much help on
this one.  Tnx.

dc

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Crawford
Titusville, Florida
United States of America
28.5146N 80.8342W
DavidECrawford at cfl.rr.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                  http://home.attbi.com/~lists/seelangs/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------