This reminds me that I have the draft on ny reading list. I haven't done a proper read yet but couldn't help noticing the remarks about Cyrillic in the appendix. Some nits about this: - There have been more spellings reforms as far as I know. Peter the Great (or "the First" as the Russians say) initiated a major one (with advice by Dutch typographers) which wiped out more characters then the SU did. Around 1880 was another major one as well. I'm not sure whether it is a good idea to single out a specific reform - I have always learned that modern russian has 33 characters (and not the 32 mentioned). The are two examples of use of diacritics in the same paragraph. These are considered separate characters in Russian alphabets. If one consider these as characters with diacrits (as one could easely do), the Russian alphabet would have 31 characters. Of course, I'm not an expert in Cyrillic and slavic languages, but it might be that other readers night be just as puzzled as me. I hope to find time to read the whole draft this week. jaap