Language Fun

Disclaimer: This post is free-thinking. That is, it follows stream of conscious thought. If you get lost in it, don't worry. We do too.

            Any of you who have ever learned a new language, not for a class or for fun but for necessity of life, know what a joy that process is. Yeah, sure. It’s a struggle for anyone, even those good at learning it. One of the added joys to the particular language we are learning is a new alphabet. Now, it’s not a hard alphabet, not anything like Devanagri (for Hindi or Nepali) or a Chinese alphabet. It is Cyrillic basically, the Russian alphabet with a few changes. It is phonetic (each letter makes one sound) and the letters look remarkably like Latin (English) letters. That is where the fun comes from:

            Let’s start with vowels. A is normal, pretty easy to deal with, E looks right and sounds right, O, yep, still doing well. I? Well, I is a backwards N, sounds like a short I (mit) but looks like И. Oh, and the N is an H. So bread, Non, is HOH. Fun huh. This, of course, means you will never be able to write a capital N in English again in your life without pondering for a second how to write it. The H is a X with a tail on the end of the bottom right side. The X without a tail brings us to another joy of this language, gutturals. These are sounds that aren’t in English at all, but are formed at the very back of the throat. German has one (the X sound in our language, sort of like you are clearing your throat) but we have the joy of two more: K with a tail (a K made with your throat, not your tongue, just try it, it’s fun) and what looks like a F (the X, but you add voice to it, sounds like you are gargling). They use X all the time too (the words for house, how are you, good, all these use gutturals) so you get a clear throat on a constant basis. Now, just to keep you hopping, there is an F without the lower line, the Г. You would think it would be an R, nope, it’s G. R is P. Yep, that’s right, so from now on you never will be sure writing R if you actually need that little tail. We do have something that looks like R though, the Я. It’s fun, it’s ya. It’s what is called a yoted vowel, one that starts with y sound. We have four of those: ё (sounds like yo, not ye), ю (yu) and й (yi) round them out. Just in case you thought you were done with vowels, we do have a y, it’s u (like in Luke, unless it has a line over it, in which case it is look, or maybe I have those backwards). If you really do like the u look though, we have it in handwriting, it is the cursive version of И. Yes, many of the cursive words have no relation whatsoever to the English or typed letters. A g handwritten is the D sound (a Д) and the handwritten T (wonderfully enough, a T in our alphabet) looks like M. Oh, we have an M, it is M, it even is handwritten M, but it has a rounded top, the T is pointed. Joy.

We do lose some sounds, there is no W in this alphabet, but we do have the Ш. It’s sh. Do you happen to like the letter B? If you do, Russian is great for you. They have lots, we only use a few. В, capitalized or not, is the v sound. On the other hand б is the sound b in English. Ъ isn’t a sound at all, it’s a glottal stop used on words imported from Arabic, sort of like the middle sound in uh-oh. Just in case that’s not enough for you, occasionally things are written in Russian, so we also get the Ь and Ы and I don't even know what sounds they make. We do have a C, but it always sounds like s. Always. Numbers are the same, but З is not 3, it is a z sound. On the other hand, a backwards Euro sign Э is a soft e, sort of like in “eh”. P is fun, it’s П, not P (remember P is R and Я is ya) Now, just in case you thought the pi thing is easy, they also have Л, a very close letter, which is the L sound. There is no plain vertical line, like I or l, those are only in Russian and I don’t know what sound that is at all. Other than that they have the ch sound Ч and something like the j in judge Ж as well as our normal j, the ch sound with a tail. It’s not in Russian, they added it for our language by the tail, so I can’t type it. Other than that, it’s really a very easy and simple alphabet.

            Ah, the joys of language, and we haven’t even mentioned learning the language and having a high version (the one that everyone teaches you, the one written in literature, but not how anyone talks at all) and a street version (what you actually need to be able to speak, but it’s nearly illegal to learn it in class, so you have to fight to have someone actually give you those words and grammar structures which are in no grammar books) and living in a place where this language is not the native one, so no one wants to speak it.

Somehow though, we are picking it up, little by little, talking with people, and actually learning to love speaking it. Once you start communicating, reading, and even writing in another language like this, even though you sound like you are 2 (look me, I go market, I come after your house and tea drink, me like eating tea) somehow they understand you and you understand bits of what they say, and it’s all worthwhile. Sometimes, it is actually pretty fun.