Eastern European "Wine"?

Slivovitz.

"MAHACTHPKA" in cyrillic is "manastirka" in roman. See

= plum brandy

M.

Used as liquid fuel for the Soyuz space program. Some gets burned to get into orbit. The rest is not wasted.

I got a bottle of Ukranian(?) ***** "KOHbRK" (the "R" is mirrored, tail to the left) = KOGNAK as a gift. The brand name is "XAH-XAK" (where the "X" has an additional vertical middle |). Luckily they identify it in the logo as "Jean-Jack" - which I find a very curious Anglo-French concoction.

M.

"Michael Pronay" skrev i melding news: snipped-for-privacy@pronay.com...

Hi That would be ? if it gets through - an aspirative J, like in french "Jean", I believe. :-) Anders

Thanks for the information. This label is completely in cyrillic, no hint as to contents, I hadn't a clue. The link was excellent. Thanks. Gary

You're welcome. Glad to help.

I have the advantage of being able to read the Cyrillic alphabet. I don't know any Russian, or any other language written in Cyrillic, but I know the alphabet (long complicated story that I won't bore you with).

What you identify as "XAH-XAK" is in fact Cyrillic for "Jean-Jack". The letter is ""zh", not "h" or "x".

Anyway, it is indeed an Ukrainian brandy:

"Cognac" is a designation of any grape-based brandy in all of the xUSSR. Some of those can be very good (generally, Armenian and Moldavian are better), and some can be awful, worse than a cheap burbon. The Jean-Jack brand is very new and its product is, to put it mildly, not particularly good.

DK

In fact I knew that - the logo helped to transliterate.

Anyhow, being back from a 10 day wine trip to the Balkans (Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Monenegro), this helped very much in deciphering Cyrillic. The inverted "R" is "ya". What about the "b", btw, they told me it's a kind of "softener"?

I was not talking about "h" or "x", only describing the letter. Anyhow - why "zh" and not "j", as "Jean-Jack" would suggest?

M.

Michael, would you please share your experiences (when you have time, of course)? I myself am back from a 3-week stay in Bulgaria (not for wine-tasting purposes only, unfortunately), and found the wine scene frizzling, as it were ;).

Yes, it softens the consonant it succeeds. When between a consonant an a vowel, it turns the vowel into an umlaut. (In Bulgarian, this is only used to turn o into ö, because the other umlauts are either not used, or have dedicated letters of their own).

Maybe because of the convention of the Western Slavists for transliterating Cyrillic? I don't know what DK's reasons for writing it that way are, but from what I remember, the convention is to use 'zh' for the letter (and for the sound in "Jean"), while 'j' is used for the umlauts: your letter "inverted R" is transliterated as 'ja'. In this convention, for Bulgarian, 'y' is used to represent the sound 'uh' (the sound for u in "but" or "Bulgaria"), where the Cyrillic letter is the one similar to the "b" you're talking about, but with a tail on top.

Well, it's not my first trip (I was in Macedonia last year), and the wines met my expectations: all the range from undrinkable to very, very good.

I have some 70 TNs, but in German, of course. I do remember a lovely dry sparkler from Skovin (MK), a fine Sauvignon Blanc from Stirbey (RO) and quite a few other excellent wines.

Thank you.

Rather a convention of anglophone slavists? My German encyclopaedia (Brockhaus, 1980), gives "z^" (ok, a z with a hacek):

_\/_ ¯¯¯/ / / /___ ¯¯¯¯ as "scientific transliteration".

Who is DK?

Because "Jean-Jacques" is a French double first name?

Just a Moment. What looks like "b" ist the softener. A "b" with a top tail to the left has been given as a schwa (is that what you mean by the sound of "but"?), while a "b" with the top tail to the right is the actual B.

M.

No surprise here; it goes with the terroir ;)

Is there a bias I'm detecting here, Michael - that you tasted/liked mostly white wines? I, for example, did not taste a single white wine while in BG; there were so many reds to explore. Did they tell you about the Bulgarian folk song we have, that goes something like: "Oh, there you are, white wine; why on earth aren't you red?" BTW, did you taste/like the Chateau Euxinograd chards? They are supposed to be the best Bulgarian whites.

Maybe. It is the convention that uses the basic Latin set of 26 letters only; no umlauts or hasheks.

I don't know. The poster who wrote that

;-)

No, just coincidence. I had beautiful reds, too, but these simply were the ones I remembered without looking up my TNs.

Sorry, no.

Sorry, no, once again.

Thank you.