Help me read the signs!

[muckefuck]

On the way to work today, noticed something very strange. At the corner there are a couple of Bradford pears (a variety native to China, btw, where it is known as the 豆梨 or "bean pear"). Before I left, one of these had shed all its leaves. A number of trees in the vicinity didn't survive this past summer and I thought this was simply another casualty. But when I passed it this morning, I noticed something on the branches after all: blossoms. It is in full bloom. Obviously, a portent of something, but can anyone tell me what?

On the way to meet my cousin in Beijing, monshu and I stopped into a coffee shop called "rbt" (in Chinese, 仙踪林 or "fairy footprint forest"). The marquee above the counter featured a montage of words for "tea" in various languages, such as English, Chinese/Japanese (茶), German (Tee), French (thé), Korean (차), and WTF ("ôóüé"). Clearly the firm which produced the design has a thing or two to learn about encoding foreign alphabets. Anyone have a guess as to what the intended word might have been? (I considered the possibility that it might be крокозябры, but AFAICT the characters would correspond to "фуьй" rather than the expected "чай".)

Comments

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Assuming the original is ISO-8859-1 (can't be UTF-8), "фуьй" would correspond to an original maccyrillic encoding: ISO-8859-5 would be "єѓќщ", and koi8-r would be "ТСЭИ". Greek ISO-8859-7 yields "τσόι", which, ironically, google suggests is used to transliterate Cantonese "choy" (菜).

None of the likely-looking Python codecs generate any leads.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

"τσόι" is, however, a near miss for "τσάι" (omicron in place of alpha), the usual Greek word for tea. So I think what we have here is a transcription error followed by an encoding error. Genius!

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Also, the difference between those two is just that the "ü" is capitalized for the alpha, so it could be a gratuitous lowercasing.

What does the Greek sound like, and where is it borrowed from?

[pne.livejournal.com]

It sounds like "tsy" (rhymes with English "sky").

I imagine it's borrowed from Turkish çay (or something like that).

[jhvilas.livejournal.com]

I've seen something similar locally -- not with a tree, but with a flowering plant. We're having a drought, and had all of about 2 inches of rain all summer. Then last week, we suddenly got over 4 inches of rain. I'm guessing the flower decided to bloom because it had no chance earlier -- it was too stressed out. It doesn't look like you folks are having a drought, but are you having something else that could have oddly stressed the tree?

[pne.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, if you have mojibake Cyrillic, my first try would be KOI8-R; I think that was historically much used in email. Next would be Windows-1251.

I don't think I'd even try out MacCyrillic.

[pne.livejournal.com]

OK, I take that back - it would be the same in Windows-1251 as in MacCyrillic, in this case, and Windows-1251 is a rather likely candidate these days.