Russia Weighs Going Cyrillic For DNS

An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian reports that the Kremlin may start an alternate top-level domain, .rf. According to the story, .ru in Cyrillic translates to .py, the top-level domain for Paraguay, which the Russian government claims leads to confusion. This is similar to a move by China, which has their own .net and .com top-level domains in their native character set along with .cn, .com, and .net in ASCII." Hindering Paraguayan hackers may matter less to the Russian government than establishing greater control over a walled-off Internet.

Comments

It's not really translation

[mr_mischief]

You can't really translate between 'r' and rho. It's a character set issue. It's a straight equivalency of sounds. Cyrillic is based on the Greek alphabet and the English alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet. It could be confused with Paraguay because of the character encoding, but it's not really the same letters.

Re:Great!!!

[Maimun]

They ARE the same. Trust me, I am Bulgarian and we also use the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet was created in the 9th century by Constantine, a Byzantine friar (I dunno if this is the correct term) serving the emperor in Constantinopol. The church name of Constatine was Cyrill, that is where the name of the alphabet came from. At that time, both Rome and Constantinopol were trying to convert the Slavic states to Christianity. The Eastern Roman Empire, a.k.a. Byzantia, was more flexible than the Catholics: she offered Christianity in the native Slavic languages, while the Catholics insisted on using Latin. The Cyrillic alphabet was introduced precisely for that purpose. It was modified Greek alphabet (Greek was, of course, was the language of the East Roman Empire) with symbols added for those Slavic sounds that had no Greek equivalent. Intially it was adopted in Bulgaria and after about a century or two it was adopted by the Russian proto-state -- in contrast to the Russian myths that the Cyrillic alphabet was first introduced in Russia and even invented in Russia.

The initial Cyrillic alphabet looked quite different from what is used today in Russia and Bulgaria; the appearance of the modern Cyrillic alphabet is due to a reform by Tzar Peter I of Russia. Peter I imposed visual style similar to the one of the Roman font.

BTW, the Cyrillic alphabet was not the only creation of Constantine-Cyrill. He had invented another alphabet to be used by the Slavs which was called "glagolitsa" and visually was totally different from the Cyrillic one. This radical design was not very successful, although I've heard it had been used in Croatia until 2-3 centuries ago.

Here is a four-column table of the original Cyrillic alphabet and the Glagolic one ("glagolitsa"). The first column is the name of each letter (yes, each one had a name; if the names are read sequentially they form a saying, quite deep and meaningful at that), the second is the cyrillic glyph, the third is the glagolic glyph, the fourth is the numeric value.