A little knowledge ...

... can ruin a joke. Over at Sinfest today Tatsuya gives us State-Sponsored Comic Strip #2. Here are the opening and closing panels:

People do this all the time to achieve a stylistic effect. A friend of mine once suffered what he describes as the most amazing feeling of dyslexia trying to read the credits for Red Heat, with the English words and the Cyrillic characters. That's what happened to me today with Sinfest.

I actually read the first two words as "aeed eeosh" before realizing what he was doing. The substitution of Я (ya) for R is old stuff, and so is И (which is (continental) I) for N - but the others... he used the Ё for E, but that letter is pronounced YO. This one Й is a consonantal Y. СОМІК is good in Ukrainian Cyrillic, a kind of fish (СОМИК in Russian), but it's pronounced someek. Ш is SH, and Ц is TS. Ч is the CH of 'church', and unfortunately ЧОЦ is completely pronounceable - as CHOTS. Also, he picked Ч instead of У for his Y (У is U) which is what I'm a bit more used to seeing in this pastiche alphabet. Still, by the end of the strip I wasn't really having trouble. H is a good Cyrillic letter - it's N - as is Д (D), so НД took me a bit, even in context, to figure out: HO HO HO HA HA HA, not ND ND ND...

But I got it all figured out without much trouble. Except for this: ФВЁЧ

ФВЁЧ is FVYoCh. But trying to get Latin letters - and going back from ЧОЦ = YOU - all I could come up with was ?BEY. I couldn't get FBEY out of my head for the longest time, since there was no Latin letter I could think of that resembled Ф. (There's theta, of course - Ф is often used to go in Russian from a TH, since that sound doesn't exist in Russian, hence all the Fyodors from Theodore, but ThBEY (or TBEY) didn't make any sense, either, even if it had fit the pattern.)

It was probably five minutes before I figured it out. Some of you are laughing at me. But in case you are, instead, still wondering - obviously Tatsuya wanted that whole word to look "Soviet", and instead of the perfectly good Cyrillic letter that actually matches the Roman one perfectly, he selected one that sorta kinda matches. But not the one he used in COMIK! Damn you, Tatsuya! Can't you be consistent? OВЁЧ would have been easier to decode ... into OBEY.

I'll bet it was much funnier and much more comprehensible to people who don't know the Cyrillic alphabet(s).