{"id":9431,"date":"2016-09-21T07:24:16","date_gmt":"2016-09-21T07:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/russian\/?p=9431"},"modified":"2018-08-14T19:53:01","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T19:53:01","slug":"tricky-russian-typography-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/russian\/tricky-russian-typography-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Tricky Russian Typography \u2013 Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have talked about keyboarding in Russian<\/a> and some peculiarities of Russian punctuation<\/a> on this blog. Let us expand on these subjects with an overview of characters that may not be easy to enter on a keyboard.<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, until very recently Russian literacy dwelled primarily in the handwritten domain. That is, of course, books were around and typesetters knew their professional standards. However, a lot of communication, be it letters, school notes, teachers’ notes on the board, or fiction manuscripts tended to be handwritten. Whatever documents had to be entered on a typewriter were usually outsourced to specially-trained typists<\/a> (\u043c\u0430\u0448\u0438\u043d\u0438\u0441\u0442\u043a\u0430 \u2014 this was typically a women’s occupations) and used simplified punctuation<\/a>. Since the 1990s, computers have started appearing in Russian households, but writing was still largely taught as penmanship, with interesting consequences for typing.<\/p>\n

Direct Speech<\/h2>\n

Direct speech (\u043f\u0440\u044f\u043c\u0430\u044f \u0440\u0435\u0447\u044c) is one of the more complex constructions<\/a> in Russian. Note the patterns in the following examples:<\/p>\n