20 Nov 2013

Learning about languages / Photos

political demonstration in front of Parliament


telephone

oddly Ukranian-looking apartment buildings

mosaic designs

Typed on my Olivetti Lettera 22

6 comments:

  1. I will try to talk just in Anglo-Saxon here. It is not so easy. Even "pure" is not an Anglo-Saxon word. But I like your tale, I like your thoughts about talk and words. The big houses with fine shapes and hues look good. Your web log is well written.

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    1. I thought about writing only in Anglo-Saxon but it would be hard to rightly say what I mean, since I am so used to using big words. But writing this, I was startled to find that I can normally tell if a word is Anglo-Saxon or not.

      Now I want to try to write more this way. But it's sad that we have lost many useful Anglo-Saxon words.

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  2. Well before 'English' was exported to the New World, it had undergone a rigorous and wonderfully inconsistent standardisation. The intention was similar to that of the state when modern Russian was introduced. It became important that a Muscovite could be understood in Petropavlovsk. Because this process was introduced relatively recently, Russian (as far as I can remember) has far fewer anomalies and inconsistencies. Fewer exceptions to rules of grammar. Now you have a decent vocabulary and a grasp of the rules you'll fly.

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    1. Of course the root problem is those Normans. But who has any idea how the history of England and therefore the New World would have progressed afterwards. We may have sacrificed the original language for something much better. Maybe not. Who knows? I just find the idea of a completely (at the least) Germanic English fascinating.

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  3. They may have adopted "kompyuter", but I like the rossifikatsiya of other computing words: "Skipnut'"
    means to press the escape key (handier than the English). And when your pirated copy of Windows 2000 crashes it delivers the blue screen of death, or "siniy ekran smerti".

    Thanks for the photo of the Soviet-era payphone -- they're a dying breed.

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    1. Another good one is самолет for airplane. :)

      The only payphone like that I've seen during the entire month here.

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