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by Tomte·12y ago·view on hn ↗
Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool.

I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like).

But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun!

So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier.

Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word.

"Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar".

I felt like the king of the world. :-)

4 comments
> Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool.

Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced? Not to mention the phonological rules that must be memorised, like how the ending of words are always devoiced (giving us fun conflicting transliterations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonoff%27s_theorem ).

To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness. I've found Hungarian spelling to be more regular, for example.

> Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced?

You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.

> To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness.

It does, but again you can pronounce all words letter for letter, and although it may sound a bit strange it'll be valid Russian.

You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.

Well technically English has no rules mandating anything, since there is no central institute or authority for the language. Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.

Practically, rules that people 50 years ago would never break are routinely ignored now, there are a bunch of things that are grammatically correct but you wouldn't ever say, etc... If something is done one way practically all the time, it might as well be a "rule", whether it officially is or not. Makes no difference to the person who has to learn it.

You're saying about formal rules but there are also implicit rules of the language.

One implicit rule of Russian is that if you pronounce each word phonetically, it is never wrong (unless you put the stress wrong).

And indeed, when publicly speaking or announcing via speakers in e.g. airport, words are pronounced almost phonetically.

Compare that to English where pronouncing phonetically is impossible and also rather undesirable.

>Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.

But that doesn't mean that the rules for English orthography aren't insane. There are very few English sentences that can be read by sounding out letter after letter individually (no matter what sound you choose as the basis for each letter.)

http://zompist.com/spell.html

The first step in trying to pronounce an English word is to subconsciously guess its language of origin.

There are rules. If you do not follow them, everybody speaking Russian would understand you, but you'll sound like a foreigner who learned Russian via books and had not enough exposure to real spoken language.
Hungarian is thankfully very regular when it comes to pronunciation, though the vowel harmony rules take some getting used to (but are very beautiful once you learn them). I also really enjoy the agglutinative aspects of the language and use of "post-positions" rather than prepositions.
My parents were both linguists in the military in the 80s, so when I had gotten to around 8 years old or so, they started trying to teach me Russian. Needless to say, it didn't stick, but I've recently been trying it again.

I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/...

And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed.

The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.

> The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over.

Heh, I have the opposite problem: I tend to mumble when speaking English (I'm a native Russian speaker). Wanna trade?

In the end you both are going to mumble both Russian and English...
Trust me you're not going to pronounce Russian fluently.

So my advice as a native speaker is: speak slowly and clearly. Speak as it is written. And good luck.

Russian writing is seriously un-phonetic. Or, more precisely, Russian pronunciation very often departs from writing. Unstressed vowels are commonly interchanged, voiced and unvoiced consonants too, and rules for correctly writing ь and ъ are so badly known that mistakes can be commonly seen in materials coming from mass media and government offices.
I wonder how Эдвард Сноуден is enjoying his time there.
he can hide behind different and equally likely transliterations of its own name.
for real. I briefly worked at a Russian news agency, where one guy's entire job was keeping track of the correct transliterations for people and places. I imagine the internet makes it somewhat easier now, but it's still a nightmare.