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 |
Related articles
- Learn the Russian language (russianreport.wordpress.com)
- Learning alphabets (kaetslanguages.wordpress.com)
- BBC World Service iPhone App in Russian (bbc.co.uk)
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