Category Archives: Russian

„В начало беше Словото“

Cyrillic was my very first foreign script. Although I knew of Greek letters and could probably recite them in order, they were in a mathematical context, so to speak, and as such I don’t take them in consideration here.

I was 17 when I borrowed my friend Natália’s Breve Manual de Língua Russa, by Nina Potapova. At that point I’d been studying English for many years and had already begun to get to know German better; even if interested in other languages by then, those were the only ones beyond a curiosity-moved threshold. And then, there it was, a door to Russian no less!

Last night I was leafing through it, and the memories just came flooding back – not only of just the book or of Russian itself, but actually of my whole life back then.

I’ve never really finished the book. Even a couple of years after I’d got it, I’d still ocassionaly sit and study it, until one day a Russian acquaintance I asked for help with the lessons told me she thought they sound off to her – either unnatural or even ungrammatical. I couldn’t judge that myself, but that did surprise me and I ended up putting the book aside for good. The impressions I got from it have lingered on though. For years to come, those Russian basics actually modelled my subjective idea of what Slavonic languages were about (which took some effort to tweak and correct in more than a few aspects), and its handwriting model has remained the basis of my own.

Or at least that’s what it’d always been! Because yesterday I sat down and decided to get back to Intensive Bulgarian, and suddenly Cyrillic didn’t seem to flow any more as it once did. I just stopped, Biro™ in hand, and it took me a conscious effort to ‘draw’ some of the letters, as my brain searched for the muscle memory I used to have. I found that shocking. Even worse – although there are handwritten examples/exercises in the book itself, they’re so different from what I taught myself back in my mid to late teens that mimicking them would just feel wrong somehow, as if I were trying to change my handwriting in Portuguese itself.

I think I’d never bothered learning whether Bulgarians might have any particular features in their handwriting that might distinguish them from Russians, for instance; on the other hand, although handwriting models do vary among countries and cultures using the same script, I just never change my own no matter which language I happen to be writing in (Portuguese, English, German, French, etc.), so I wasn’t sure that would make a difference either.

I did change some of my Cyrillic hand when I studied Serbian, and that felt natural somehow; on the other hand, my Latin hand remained the same in it regardless. Go figure!

I came to the computer and started googling for samples of Bulgarian and Cyrillic cursive in general. Learnt a couple of curious new things, but didn’t really identify at all with the vast majority of the materials I found. That’s when it dawned on me that I should return to the origins, and how I got back to having Nina Potapova’s book in my hands. I suppose I’m just meant to be comfortable with my 1960s Cyrillic handwriting style after all!

The purge (aka just tidying away)

I’ve taken the past couple of days to (re)organise my languages (regarding both materials and in my head) – there often is way too much clutter to deal with!

Gone are Armenian, Bengali, Cantonese, Finnish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Romanian, Russian, Tamil and Vietnamese; Swedish, which had made a quick but astounding comeback, was sent home as well (but I just couldn’t help dubbing it my ‘European Thai’ before, for its ability to regularly return from the Great Beyond). Although they were more like appendices, I’ve also had Faroese, Konkani and Marathi materials out too.

Despite, to all intents and purposes, existing in limbo, I’m keeping all things (Mandarin) Chinese, Esperanto, (Ancient) Greek, Hindustani, Latin, Polish, Turkish and Welsh, because the necromancer in me still feels way too attached to all the possibilities they offer, and I may always choose to spin the wheel of life and bring them back. For now.

หลักเกณฑ์การทับศัพท์ภาษาโปรตุเกส

“จง​ขอ​เถิด แล้ว​ท่าน​จะ​ได้​รับ จง​แสวงหา​เถิด แล้ว​ท่าน​จะ​พบ จง​เคาะ​ประตู​เถิด แล้ว​เขา​จะ​เปิด​ประตู​รับ​ท่าน เพราะ​คน​ที่​ขอ​ย่อม​ได้​รับ คน​ที่​แสวงหา​ย่อม​พบ คน​ที่​เคาะ​ประตู​ย่อม​มี​ผู้​เปิด​ประตู​ให้”

Mt 7:7–8

To my surprise, I’ve found out that the Royal Institute of Thailand has actually issued rules for the transliteration of foreign words into Thai! From all I’ve read about them, I should actually be surprised I didn’t think of looking it up before.

From what I can gather, and just as I’d imagined, they’ve come up with systems that attempt to reflect as much of the phonology of the original languages and yet represent as much of the original orthographic features and idiosyncrasies by the Thai script.

The languages whose standards have been published seem to be:

  • Arabic;
  • Chinese;
  • English;
  • French;
  • German;
  • Hindi;
  • Italian;
  • Japanese;
  • Korean;
  • Malay;
  • Russian;
  • Spanish;
  • Vietnamese.

That means that, contrarily to what the title of this post says, there doesn’t seem to be an official system for Portuguese.

For many features of Portuguese, I could actually come up with a reasonable basic system derived from common rules taken from the published standards that would also be valid for Portuguese – the representation of /ʒ/ by ฌ, for instance; for others, however, I wouldn’t be able to trace any parallels at all and would have to rely on examples found online and, well, my own whim – such as how to deal with unique sounds or raised (neutralised) unstressed vowels (to represent phonology or to reflect orthography?).

«Авеню Бразилия»

Armenian transliterations of Portuguese bring me back to that pet hate of mine – the way Portuguese reduced vowels get transcribed in certain different languages/scripts. As I’ve said before, I’m used to treating any reduced vowels as if they were levelled back to full vowels before being transliterated, as if that was some sort of ‘neutral state’; other languages/scripts, however, seem to take a more phonological approach, so to speak, trying to reflect that actual ‘standard’ pronunciation at the expense of orthography, and that always looks out of place to me.

I remember seeing that a lot in Russian, for instance, particularly because Brazilian soap operas seem to be popular enough there for articles on Brazilian actors being easily found in Russian around the Web — Murílo Benício, for instance, shows up a lot as Мурилу Бенисиу (although the Wikipedia article itself, as a curious example, alternates between that and Мурило Бенисио). Bulgarian seems to go the same way as Russian, although there’s a lot less material for me to check online.

Japanese, on the other hand, seems to follow an orthographic approach almost always (only recently have I found a couple of diverging examples, but I assumed the disparities were big enough to make it obvious that the person transcribing the names didn’t really seem to speak any Portuguese – they clearly treated Portuguese ⟨j⟩ as if it was Spanish instead!), and so does Greek. Korean also seems to present very little variation on that.

Now Armenian started to present a couple of such examples, and, for the look of it, it seems to go either way, at the whim of the writer. As with Bulgarian, though, there won’t really be that much for me to explore, so let’s see what I’m yet to find out.

Some languages, by the way, can’t really be classified in such respects because of the very nature of their scripts. Such fine distinctions would be too much to ask from e.g. Arabic (and Persian) or Chinese.

Oh, and, although I’ve focused on vowels, even consonants can get into the game – using Russian once again, it’s really exotic to find Marcelo Novaes referred to as Марселу Новаеш, Марселу Новаис and a handful of other combinations!