Orthography question

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Purely out of curiosity...

What is the symbol that I've seen before the number of a Russian school? (I mean the one that looks like an upside-down "r".) Is it the same as the symbol we use in English, #, meaning "number"? And is it only used with schools, or with other things, too?

Thanks!

Edited to add: Never mind, it's a silly question. My browser shows the symbol incorrectly, it's really very simple: №

Comments

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly!

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Спасибо :)

[no-access.livejournal.com]

In russian we use № meaning number, but it doesnt look like upside-down "r"...

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Mmm... yeah, I was remembering it wrong, sorry! Upside-down _and backwards_ "r".

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it look as No for you? At all? I'm just curious.

[slovami.livejournal.com]

No... it looks exactly like an upside-down and backwards r. Is it supposed to look like "No."? Is my internet browser doing funny things?

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Haha, apparently so. In a different browser, it looks like "No." That makes SO MUCH more sense. :)

Silly computer...

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Yes, I guess that's the case -- this is how you should see it if you had Cyrillic fonts installed correctly (or properly enabled in your browser):

[khathi.livejournal.com]

"№"? It's a "numero" character, a common european number sign. It is a ligature of "No" -- Latin abbreviation for "numero", "number". It isn't limited to Russia, BTW, and is used throughout all of Europe.

[markushka.livejournal.com]

In Russian keyboard layout it is usually located on the same button as 3 - "3 shifted" - №

[icamel.livejournal.com]

In 'Russian (Typewriter)' layout it is at same button as 1. In Russian Typewriter keyboard numbers are shifted, while punctuation and special characters are not.

OT. Russian typewriter keyboard layout is much more convinient for massive text typing -- e.g. you don't have to press ',' as '.' shifted, and you don't have to use shift at all for punctuation. But, unfortunately, it is not spread widely.

[ljusalfheim.livejournal.com]

Where can I find it? Do you have a picture?

[icamel.livejournal.com]

If you have Windows XP, then

Control Panel → Regional and Language Options → Languages → Details... → Add... → Input language: Russian, Keyboard layout/IME: Russian (Typewriter).

If you have another M$ Windows system, it should be something alike, if not the same. I don't know how to do that in non-Windows systems.

In case anyone wanted to know:

[slovami.livejournal.com]

In Mac OSX, it's

System Preferences -> International -> Input menu -> scroll down and check Russian or Russian (phonetic). The former is a "real" Russian keyboard and the latter is a keyboard where the letters are in the same places as ours (approximately - q is я, and there are some other weird things).

From that pane you can also specify keyboard shortcuts for switching between Russian and English, and if you check the box "Show input menu in menu bar" you get a little drop-down menu of flags up by the battery and time and such in Finder.

[konstkaras.livejournal.com]

There was other sign widely used, a small N with stretched left line, like this: