09-20-2014, 02:58 PM (This post was last modified: 09-20-2014, 03:10 PM by Auke.)
I translated this attestation a while back (it goes on for another page, but you get the gist). This must be one of the weirdest pieces of Russian handwriting I have seen. Note how the а's all look like и's; the о's look like и's, п's or а's; the р's look like т's or н's; the б's look like т's; the в's look like н's; the ь's look like в's; and the ы's look like, well, something indescribable. :rolleyes:
(The words I marked are работает, руководству, опыт, полком, весь, период, and проверила)
Well, I have seen a's written like this, but "Y" is indeed indescribable.
I remember that back in my university days we had the paleography practice. Well, it was easier to decipher the middle ages "fences" (a number of similar looking letters, one after another, that looked more or less like this: "[[[[[[["), however, there was a limited number of letters that could be representd by that, so with basics of Latin one could read the word, but here in Russian handwriting the almost every letter could berepresented by countless symbols.
Now I know just what letter this is (and it is Cyrillic) but I am sure it would confuse many. The person who wrote this had a rather poor writing style.
It is indeed an upper case "Б". There was a Bulgarian at the Sports And Culture Committee in the 1950's that had a habit of writing "o" like this. Easily confused for an R.
