Big Cottonwood Soup

Last week, I experienced a bit of reverse culture shock. This was all the more surprising given that I had neither left my original cultural environment nor spent any significant amount of time emerged in the culture I had seemingly adopted.

I was waiting for the ski bus and looking over the posted schedule. After checking the return times, my eyes were drawn to the route map. Upon reading the labels Big Cottonwood Cyn and Little Cottonwood Cyn, I did a double-take: It took me a full ten seconds to realize that cyn is the (English) abbreviation for canyon rather than суп, the Russian word for soup. With italics, they're indistinguishable, so here they are again without emphasis: cyn vs суп. Despite the small difference, having once misread the sign, I cannot unsee the soup.

Left: UTA ski bus map. Right Russian Wikipedia article on soup

The Opposite Problem

Although this is the first time I've accidentally mistaken the Latin alphabet for Cyrillic, the opposite problem — reading Cyrillic characters as Latin ones — was very common when I first started learning Russian and Ukrainian and is a problem that continues to haunt me. Many Cyrillic letters look the same as Latin letters but are pronounced differently. For example:

• В/в sounds like V/v
• Н/н sounds like N/n
• Р/р sounds like R/r

One of the more infamous examples is ресторан (restaurant, transliteration: restoran), but others include север (north, transliteration: sever), верх (up, transliteration: verkh), and of course the СССР (USSR, which is surprisingly close to the transliteration: SSSR).