Thread: How do Russians and others normally switch between Latin and non-Latin keyboards?

Wow, you are running 3 alphabets simultaneously!!! I can't imagine anyone here beats that!

I think most people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgizstan etc do the same.

My current manager was one of the first female programmers in Sweden, and her stories are very fascinating.

My mother was a programmer.

I have never seen a Russian made computer in real life, but I remember the name Robotron.

It was not Russian.
An example of a Soviet computer would be Искра 226. It was the first computer I worked with.

Wow, I am in awe by you guys! Did not know that IT was such a common profession here.
I was taught programming by people like you, but in England. I always admired those who worked in computing back when it needed serious brains... I got in just when object oriented programming kicked off, meaning you did not have to be seriously clever to be a programmer anymore. The senior guys called it "Donald Duck programming" because it was so simple, according to them. I never got very good at C++ even though I gave it a shot, just to show myself I had the brains..

Anixx, wouldn't mind taking your mother to lunch if I am ever in Moscow! Hope she is healthy and well in retirement. I would probably find her career endlessly fascinating, particularly in light of her being a woman.

I did not know that computing was so accessible to regular people in the USSR. Some aspects of USSR life seemed a little bit old fashioned, and there was lots of talk about how cool products that people wanted, sometimes were not available in the socialist countries. So I guess I just assumed that people did not have computers, at least not at home. Sounds like I was wrong about that. It's very cool to think that the Eastern European computer industry made the computer parts from scratch, rather than importing from Taiwan, Korea, Japan etc. Too bad they did not continue with that. It is a bit creepy that in Europe (and America) we are no longer able to put together a computer from scratch. We are 100% dependant on parts that only Asian countries have the know-how to assemble.

Anixx, wouldn't mind taking your mother to lunch if I am ever in Moscow! Hope she is healthy and well in retirement. I would probably find her career endlessly fascinating, particularly in light of her being a woman.

She is dead unfortunately.

She was a physicist and teacher by education, she worked in school, and then with low-temperature physics but eventually she was invited to work in programming as early as the Ulal computer Ural (computer) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia because at the time it was considered a job for physicists. She later programmed in Assembler and PL/I for mainframes.

She worked on a secret job and had no right to tell what she was doing. I only know that it was somehow connected with real-time space communication. Once she wrote a driver for plotter in assembler and we had at home a stack of papers lined for "Preference" cards game (they were plotted by a test program).

We had a lot of punch cards at home and printed machine outputs. I also remember large paper lists (definitely larger than A2) with multiple blocks interconnected with each other with arrows like in Visio diagrams. They were labelled "stack of punch cards", "magnet drum", "remote console" etc. She drew these diagrams with special stencil. She also had a cheat sheet she made herself for deciphering punch cards.

When she lost her work in 1991 we made a good fire of the punch cards near our home.

I did not know that computing was so accessible to regular people in the USSR. Some aspects of USSR life seemed a little bit old fashioned, and there was lots of talk about how cool products that people wanted, sometimes were not available in the socialist countries. So I guess I just assumed that people did not have computers, at least not at home. Sounds like I was wrong about that. It's very cool to think that the Eastern European computer industry made the computer parts from scratch, rather than importing from Taiwan, Korea, Japan etc. Too bad they did not continue with that. It is a bit creepy that in Europe (and America) we are no longer able to put together a computer from scratch. We are 100% dependant on parts that only Asian countries have the know-how to assemble.

Most of Soviet computers after Brezhnev were copies of Western analogs at least by architecture. Brezhnev is often criticized for the decision to copy rather than develop ourselves. Before that the USSR made computers of its own architecture. Some people even called the politburo meeting where this decision was taken a disaster.

Originally Posted by Anixx

I think most people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgizstan etc do the same.

Да, двуязычие не редкому явления в наши дни. На израиле, практически все люди из советских корней знают три языки. Круто, да?

If I remember correctly (being a Linux user myself) a standard Windows installation in Germany will only have the German layout. That means that y and z are swapped in comparison to English and most of the symbols for interpunction are distributed differently. You can easily write English with it, so there is no need to have an English layout installed.

Originally Posted by Valda

Да, двуязычие не редкому явления в наши дни. На израиле, практически все люди из советских корней знают три языки. Круто, да?

Да, двуязычие - не редкое явление в наши дни. В Израиле практически все люди с советскими корнями знают три языка. Круто, да?
Sorry, but do you write without cases?

I think you write without cases
Negative is genitive hence

редкое явление -> редкому явления

I did make a mistake in языка, but conjugated из according to its case. Whether it was correct to use из instead of с is another matter, but I did use the appropriate case for из.

So to conclude, I used
Genitive, prepositional and genitive again. No, I don't write without cases.

Valda, you do not need genitive here, only nominative. And Genitive of "редкое явление" is "редкого явления". "Редкому" is Dative.
So you put "двуязычие" in Nominative, "редкое" in Dative and "явление" in Genitive, while all the three words should be in one case, Nominative.

"люди из советских корней" - the meaning of what you said is as if the people were made of Soviet plants' roots.

The idiom actually means the the people HAVE Soviet roots as a tree can have roots (which still bound them to their birthplace), not that they are MADE of Soviet roots.

Even in English you say "people WITH Soviet roots", not "people MADE FROM Soviet roots".

Valda, you do not need genitive here, only nominative. And Genitive of "редкое явление" is "редкого явления". "Редкому" is Dative.
So you put "двуязычие" in Nominative, "редкое" in Dative and "явление" in Genitive, while all the three words should be in one case, Nominative.

I accidentally looked at the Dative line in the dictionary for редкое and явление - You're right. Though I don't understand why you claim it's nominative where there is clear negation here. Negation is genitive.

"люди из советских корней" - the meaning of what you said is as if the people were made of Soviet plants' roots.

And I completely stand by it. They are really hardy people! Ever tried to arm wrestle one? I swear it's like they're made of roots! Can't bend them...

Fine. I made a mistake here. Will use "с" next time.

Negation is genitive.

Who said you so?

Take English for example: "Bilinguism is not a rare thing". Where do you see "of" here? There is no meaning here that could be conveyed as Genitive. It is a simple statement "A is B".

Russian/Grammar/Genitive case - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

The genitive case has four main uses: to denote possession ('Michael's car', 'the car of Michael'), to denote number ('five apples'), in negative constructions ('there are no books'), and after several important prepositions ('without me').

"There are no books"
"This is not a rare phenomenon"

What's the difference?

Originally Posted by Anixx

Most of Soviet computers after Brezhnev were copies of Western analogs at least by architecture. Brezhnev is often criticized for the decision to copy rather than develop ourselves. Before that the USSR made computers of its own architecture. Some people even called the politburo meeting where this decision was taken a disaster.

Yes, something went wrong in the USSR - invention stopped and things stagnated. Somehow people lost the spark to really drive things forward. I think it is tragic and I wish I understood what happened. For what it is worth I do not consider the capitalist system to be one ounce better.


URAL computer looks very cool!! Steampunk, LOL.

Wiki says "The computer was widely used in the 1960s, mainly in the socialist countries, though some were also exported to Western Europe and Latin America."

Look, this is the computer that Anixx mum worked with:



Gosh I wonder what they used it for! Gives us some perspective on our laptops for sure!

Vacuum tubes? It was used to keep the room warm! Looks like several kilowatts.

Originally Posted by Hanna

Yes, something went wrong in the USSR - invention stopped and things stagnated. Somehow people lost the spark to really drive things forward. I think it is tragic and I wish I understood what happened. For what it is worth I do not consider the capitalist system to be one ounce better.


URAL computer looks very cool!! Steampunk, LOL.

Wiki says "The computer was widely used in the 1960s, mainly in the socialist countries, though some were also exported to Western Europe and Latin America."

Look, this is the computer that Anixx mum worked with:

And later she worked at BESM-6:



And then with something like this:

Yes, something went wrong in the USSR - invention stopped and things stagnated.

Yes, and what a baffling mystery!

Are you totally unaware of the beneficial effects seen under Lenin's "New Economic Policy" -- when private entrepreneurship (on a small scale) was temporarily "unbanned", in violation of orthodox Marxist thought? Are you equally unaware of what happened when Stalin ended the NEP and ushered in the "Five Year Plans"?

Or do you just stubbornly refuse to draw any lessons from these historical observation, lest you be forced to admit that, maybe, Communism is more than an ounce worse than Capitalism? I mean, it's one thing to admire Soviet technical proficiency, and to correct Westerners who underestimate Soviet science. But it's another thing to totally shut your eyes to -- for example -- what a total f**king backwards embarrassment the Soviet agricultural sector was, for most or all of the USSR's history.

Yet when one breezily says "The capitalist system is not one ounce better," you ARE shutting your eyes to the degrading effects that communist theories had on various sectors of the Soviet economy.

(At some point, this pretense of being "unbiased" and "not buying into US propaganda" crosses from intelligent historical skepticism into пошлость -- or at least, Nabokov once said this, and I agree with his point.)

We are 100% dependant on parts that only Asian countries have the know-how to assemble.

AFAIK, it's not a question of "know-how," really -- it has more to do with (a) labor costs, and (b) "exporting" high-pollution manufacturing processes abroad.

In fact, (b) is especially important, because making computer components is VERY FAR from "Green". (For the same reason, we eco-conscious Westerners buy compact-fluorescent bulbs and LED bulbs that are made in China -- these technologies may save a lot of electricity here, but they're quite "dirty" to manufacture. However, it has nothing to do with lacking "know how" to produce these items in our own countries.)

P.S. The photos of vintage computers reminded me of this classic one-liner:

Наши советские микрокомпьютеры самые большие в мире, и советские часы - самые быстрые!
Our Soviet microcomputers are the largest in the world, and Soviet watches are the fastest!

[A "boast" that has been apocryphally attributed to Brezhnev and others, though I don't think there's any evidence of any Soviet leader ever saying it! ]

Now the US standard considers that switching is not necessary.

Aha, now I see your point. Yes, you're right -- it would be better to have a "dedicated" key built into the keyboard for alphabet-switching.

I've become aware of that this afternoon while trying to use a "public Internet computer" at the library, because of laptop problems. The PCs are set up for Alt-Shift switching; however, the "language bar" has been enabled for dozens and dozens of different world languages, which are arranged alphabetically in the language bar.

So when I instinctively try to "Alt-Shift" for Cyrillic, it goes instead to Arabic; then to Armenian; then to the Bengali version of the Hindi alphabet; then Bosnian Cyrillic; then Chinese (simplified); etc., etc. Of course, Russian Cyrillic is about three-quarters of the way down the alphabetized list, so there's no point in actually trying to Alt-Shift (I tried once, but hit Alt-Shift one too many times, which took me past Russian to Spanish, and there's no way to move backward in the list!)

But the single most annoying part is that the library computers have not been set up for a simple switch BACK to US-English layout -- so toggling between Russian Cyrillic and US Roman is a huge hassle, and I've resorted to using a "virtual online keyboard." (I know I could set up some sort of Ctrl key combination to do the Russian/English toggling, if I cared to.)