Not surprisingly, looking at my pill counter it seems I somehow managed to miss taking my meds all day yesterday. If anyone feels "unsurprised" by the following missive, I sympathize, but they should "irregardless" turn themself over to the grammar police and throw themself on the mercy of the diction court ;-).
Is Cyrrilic another example of a bad shoehorning of Roman characters into a foreign language? At least Saint Cyrrilus created a bunch of new characters.
Ш sh
Щ tsch
Ч ch
Ы (и? Й?) not sure if these are actually pronounced differently like русский rooskee (why the extra й?) or вы vee “you” (formal). To wit, a French person telling you that the o in hôtel and hommage are pronounced differently is almost certainly yanking you—it’s really more like a Richelieu nod to words that were spelled with an s in non-Parisian dialects during nation-building under Henri IV. Also yankeriferous the Japanese native who asserts that 端橋箸 (all “hashi” edge, bridge, chopstick(s) respectively) have different tones—whatever, dude-sensei… it could be easier argued that English is a tonal language.
Я Ю ё Э(“liquid vowels” ya, yoo, “yioh,” “yuh/yeh” — whackily enough, eerily even, these are written the same as their matching liquid hiragana characters in Japanese やゆよ(“ye” obsolete in modern Japanese but also similar)…in Cyrillic cursive, anyway)
Actually I think I got that wrong—e is liquid as in ещё раза (“yeshyow rasa” - “one more time”) making Э the non-liquid high middle vowel.
ь ъ “pronunciation modifiers” — I don’t have a good grip on these, they might be to do with final glottal stops or voicing/devoicing or something…they’re called something like myakisnak and vrekisnak, respectively (“something-mark” and “something-else-mark”) I gather they function as “in-line diacriticals” or something, and they may govern the entire word or maybe just the preceding character.
How to spell stuff in Russian? I still have a lot to learn but it seems god-awful, eg, пожалуйста “pahzhaluhsta” = “please” So Russian shares the icky English orthographic (ortho being generous) feature of all unstressed vowels going to schwa
ə (or to “ah” in the case of Russian). Джиперс! Or maybe it’s джйпэрз! Or even джйпорз! Or maybe something else again (Jeepers!)—one of them may actually be “right”...
…combined with painful absence of user-friendly Spanish-like stress indicators (except in dictionaries and books for children)
As you may notice, there is no hard J in Russian orthography (just as, like with Jack Sprat, or Яков Спратов, English has no soft), which leads me to guess that the Dzhanibekov effect is not named after an ethnic Russian mathematician, per se, but a Kazakh or something. I write my name as Джей Иванович Дирен in Russian, for instance (Jay Dearien, son of John). My first name is almost as long as my last!
Those darn Romans! Imposing their alphabet on us Slavs and Germans!! The Japanese must harbor similar resentments and love-hate relationships vis-à-vis Chinese cultural/textual hegemony.
Anyway, that’s just stuff I’ve picked up over the years…
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