ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic

Okay kiddo, so there are different alphabets that people use to write in different languages. One of those alphabets is called Cyrillic and it's used to write Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and some other languages.

Now, sometimes we need to write those languages using the Latin alphabet, which is the one we use for English. That's where scientific transliteration comes in.

Scientific transliteration is a way of taking the letters in Cyrillic and replacing them with letters in the Latin alphabet based on specific rules. This helps people who don't know the Cyrillic alphabet to read and understand the words.

For example, the letter "ш" in Cyrillic looks like a backwards "m" with a tail. In scientific transliteration, it's changed to the letter "sh."

Another letter, "ї," looks like a dot above the letter "i" in Cyrillic. In scientific transliteration, it's changed to the letter "yi."

There are many different rules for transliterating Cyrillic, but they are all designed to make it easy for people who don't know Cyrillic to read and understand the words. So scientists and researchers who study these languages use scientific transliteration when they need to write in the Latin alphabet instead of Cyrillic.