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To: Lazamataz
Odd. The first character is not the Russian ‘h’ sound (they actually don’t QUITE have an ‘h’, more like the Greek semi-vocalized ‘h’.) I wonder how it got changed in translation. I think that first letter is ‘g’.

That's because it's a Ukrainian г, not a Russian one. From Wikipedia:

The letter 〈г〉 represents voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/, often transliterated as Latin h. It is the voiced equivalent of English /h/. Russian speakers from Ukraine often use the soft Ukrainian /ɦ/ in place of Russian /ɡ/, which comes from northern dialects of Old East Slavic. The Ukrainian alphabet has the additional letter 〈ґ〉 for /ɡ/, which appears in a few native words such as ґринджоли gryndžoly 'sleigh' and ґудзик gudzyk 'button'. However, /ɡ/ appears almost exclusively in loan words, and is usually simply written 〈г〉. For example, loanwords from English on public signs usually use 〈г〉 for both English g and h.

40 posted on 03/08/2014 10:10:21 AM PST by Vroomfondel
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To: Vroomfondel
The first character in Adolf’s last name is spelled with “ghe” in Russian (as in Гитлер, Адольф). Same applies to Herzegovina in that language (Босния и Герцеговина).
45 posted on 03/08/2014 10:24:07 AM PST by Olog-hai
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To: Vroomfondel

Fascinating! I did NOT know that Cyrillic characters had different sounds based on country localization!

Learn something new every day!


46 posted on 03/08/2014 10:25:49 AM PST by Lazamataz (Early 2009 to 7/21/2013 - RIP my little girl Cathy. You were the best cat ever. You will be missed.)
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