Why Is the Russian Alphabet So Weird?

The “backward” letters in the Cyrillic script

Cyrillic script

The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living near the Byzantine Empire in South East and Central Europe.

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used for writing Russian aren't backward at all but are actually entirely different letters who simply looked up looking like letters from the Latin alphabet.

Why is the R backwards in Russian?

The backward R or “Я” means “I” or “me” in Russian. This suits, as 'Untethered' is largely an auto-biographical piece on identity and alternate paths walked, after facing up to moral junctions in life.

Why does the Russian alphabet look like that?

It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, Old Slavonic. Initially an old variant of the Bulgarian alphabet, it became used in the Kievan Rus' since the 10th century to write what would become the Russian language.