Day: March 12, 2012

RL101-7 The Sibilants

Playout date: 12 November 2006
Camera: Logitech Webcam
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – medium use
Location: Capetown Arabella Sheraton, South Africa
Other people featured: None
Genre: Lesson
Music used: “Vdol’ po ulitse metelitsa metyot” with my wife
Languages used: Russian, English
Animals featured: None

In this seventh lesson in the 10 lesson course on the Russian alphabet known as RL-101 series, we find ourselves in the Arabella Sheraton in Cape Town South Africa, with table Mountain looming behind my head. This is the perfect setting to place a new set of consonants on the table, namely the sibilants.
The problem with the sibilants as far as Cyril and Methodius and their acolytes were concerned is that that is a group of consonants which you simply would not find in either Latin or Greek. To this day these sounds present difficulties to people transcribing Russian sounds into Western European languages. So whereas the sounds that we have met until now have come from Greek into the Cyrillic alphabet, the missionaries to the Slavs had to look for another source in order to render these sounds in Slavonic.

Hebrew was the next choice, being another biblical language. The letter shin and the letter tzaddi are both sibilants in Hebrew, so they were brought in and also amended, so that from shin we derive three sibilant letters in Russian, and from tzaddi we derive two.

The words introduced in this lesson are as follows:

that .., что
borshch (beetroot soup) борщ
in (acc/prep) в
Warsaw Варшава
you (formal/plural, acc/gen) вас
Washington Вашингтон
goodbye до свидания
stomach желудок
wife жена
woman женщина
fat жир
arse жопа
hello здравствуйте
how’s it going? как дела?
how? как?
when? когда?
end конец
of course конечно
face лицо
on (acc/prep) на
because потому, что
why? почему?
Friday пятница
Tashkent Ташкент
you (inf sing, acc/gen) тебя
comrade товарищ
what? что?
spy шпион
shi (cabbage soup) щи
egg яйцо
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