Thread: As simple as: "I miss you"

Hi,

could someon please help me w/ the translation for "I miss you" in Russian?

Thanks,
Sim

Originally Posted by Simona

Hi,

could someon please help me w/ the translation for "I miss you" in Russian?

Thanks,
Sim

Я скучаю по тебе.
Mне тебя не хватает.

How does one write in Russian using Latin characters? Are there clear rules for conversion?

Suggested immediate application: Я скучаю по тебе.

Many thanks in advance,
Sim

What's the point in writing it in Latin characters? If you're writing it by hand, just copy it. If you're typing it on the computer, cut and paste. Voila.

No offense, but I am genuinely interested in how the conversion from Cyrillics to Latin characters works.

As a matter of convenience, I believe most speakers of Russian, Bulgarian, etc use Latin characters to write in these languages when the system does not automatically allow them to use Cyrillics. I'm referring to communication over e-mail, of course.

Best,
Sim

Я скучаю по тебе- Ya skuchayu po tebe

Originally Posted by Simona

No offense, but I am genuinely interested in how the conversion from Cyrillics to Latin characters works.

As a matter of convenience, I believe most speakers of Russian, Bulgarian, etc use Latin characters to write in these languages when the system does not automatically allow them to use Cyrillics. I'm referring to communication over e-mail, of course.

Best,
Sim

It's no magical process. They just write things out phonetically, although there are are a number of "official" transliteration systems. Ocasionally they may even stick in Latin characters that resemble the Cyrillic one they're trying to write, e.g. 4 for Ч, X for X, and so on.

Thank you, Pravit! Just checked out your website too, you seem to have quite a lot of useful stuff there!

My experience is that just "going phonetic," without knowing how words are spelt in Cyrillics doesn't really work--though in most cases they'll understand what you mean. I once tried to write "thank you"--a word that I had heard, but had never seen written in Russian. My own language is phonetic, so i figured i'd just type in what I heard...i ended up writing "spasiba" instead of "spasiboe."

Sim

Glad you like my site

My experience is that just "going phonetic," without knowing how words are spelt in Cyrillics doesn't really work--though in most cases they'll understand what you mean.

Of course it doesn't really work. Transliteration is used when, for some reason, you can't write with Cyrillic letters. As for "spasiba", it looks a lot better to me than "spasiboe." What is your language, by the way?

Romanian. Among the Slavic languages, I would argue that Russian is somewhat on the less phonetic side. Again from experience, I find Bulgarian much more phonetic, for instance.

Pravit, I don't think that the "4" is a transliteration of Ч. It's some kind of glitch that converts the electrons of Ч into the electrons of 4. I think it's got something to do with unix-to-windows conversion.

But to respond to the original question, there are two (I think) official conversions of cyrillic to english in the US. The one used by the Library of Congress, where Я for example is written "ia" with a curved line linking them above them and X is written "kh" with the curved line, and another one (I don't remember if it has a name or not) that doesn't use those curved lines, where Я is written "ya" and Х is written kh.

Those are the normal ones. And then there's the one used by Slavic linguists (like myself), where we write Я as "ja", X as "X", and use hacheks over a C or S to represent Ч or Ш. Take a look at Czech text and you'll see this one in action.

Do svidanija!

Romanian? I have many connections with Romania, due to me being adopted.(I'm not adopted from Romania though) Are you from Bucharest, Simona?

Chaika, I'm afraid you're wrong here. I don't know what you mean by characters having electrons(are you referring to different encodings?), but if you go into some Russian chat room, you often see people writing transliterated Russian and using the 4 where you'd use a Ч. Besides that, I don't know how many Russian teenagers have computers that run on Unix. Now, if you had a standard Russian text written with Cyrillic letters that had "4" in place of "Ч", your argument would make a little bit more sense. You're talking to a computer Russification expert here.

As an example of what I'm talking about:

russiand00d16: lol lol 4uvak
sveta_NY: lollllllll
dogboy182: krrrrrrrrrrruto
russiand00d16: blin xrenovaja svjaz pereklu4ajus

б - 6(six)
л - J|
д - 9
ь - b

4To 9eJ|aTb?
Читать правда такое - глаза сломаешь :)

Yeah, some people use that trick =) usually for their nicks, when non-latin characters are not allowed

OJIE}I{KA
KuCyJI9I
JIanO4kA
and even OJIbryH4uK

Pravit, O I C. I haven't been to a chat room like that, and the only use of 4 for Ч I have seen was in emails, and I thought it was a unix-to-windows encoding problem, but maybe you're right. All the same, I don't think I would set up chatroom spelling as a norm to emulate.

Personally, if I were in one, I'd still use "ch" instead of "4" though must admit I have used roflmao.

bbfn =:^0

I don't think it'd be good to emulate chatroom spelling either, chaika. I was merely pointing out some transliteration oddities you see on the net sometimes.

Yep, it's quite common using 4 instead of Ч. But I think they do this cause the word четыре starts with Ч. And in different languages this Ч sound is spelled differently and it's rarely written down in one commom Latin letter without waves, stresses and so on above it (the only suitable language I can think of right now is Italian).
BTW, I see it often that people use 6 instead of Ш. For the same reasons I guess.