Originally posted by Manjana
Sounds not very Russian, even the writing is it translated in English: 'Sputnik'??? Russian writing is kyrillic....so why isn't the name writen in kyrillic? Maybe the press did translate the font...so I thought it was English.
Well I am no expert in kyrillic, but I think that it is somehow like greek letters, which means that the language could be written with latin letters without problems as the letters literally mean the same, they just look different (for example, the russian CCCP (these are kyrillic letters) means SSSR, the kyrillic C is the latin S, the P the R and so on. I think the language has some special letters, too, but so has German, Danish and so on, ß, Ø, å, æ, ä are not real latin letters, either.
This means that Sputnik is correct, as the russian letters are translated 1:1 into latin letters.
Indeed, the same thing applies to Japanese (my sister is learning Japanese). The japanese language could be written in Latin letters without problems, in fact in the last century, japanese people had a vote whether to adapt our latin letters or keep their own letters. Understandable, they chose to keep their identity, so japanese is written with several thousand symbols (you need 800 to read a newspaper)