The alphabet of Fucatokk contains the same 26 letters of the modern English alphabet and no diacritics.
Each letter has one sound only and always keeps that sound. Words are spelt as they sound in the Fucatokk language.
Some of the letters, especially ‘q’ and ‘x’ have quite different values to those usually given in modern English, but most letters are not so surprising.
The punctuation marks and the numbers, other than where they abbreviate letters using the Fucatokk alphanumeric shorthand, follow typical European usage, except for the absence of capitalisation, which is perfectly acceptable form in Fucatokk.
Many people visiting this will know Esperanto, so here are the Esperanto equivalents of the Fucatokk letters:
Accepting predestination and the sovereignty of God on the one hand is
not a reason not to act as though you can change things on the other. Fatalism is never commanded in the Bible.
Job worked hard all his life to get into the situation he was, but
nevertheless when he lost everything, he said “the Lord giveth, the
Lord taketh away”. When he had his losses restored I would assume he
also worked and tried to make the best of what he had, even though he
would have acknowledged that it was a gift. He didn’t just sit back.
That’s why I’m not in favour of just sitting back and accepting the Anti-Christ, the beast, the Whore of Babylon, the False Prophet, just
because these entities are prophesied in Scripture. We are to reject
the mark of the Beast, and not acquiesce in that mark being put on our
flesh. We are the sheep of another Shepherd, and our brandmark is
written on the fleshy tables of the heart.
The devil will always say, “you cannot change it, because even your God
has prophesied it. Go along with my plans uncomplainingly. If you
challenge what false prophets and wicked people are doing, it looks as
if you are complaining against the sovereignty of God” But this is not
the case, as the Word shows what believers are to do in such cases. We
should not be amazed and put to a crisis of our faith over it, but we
should act in whatever way we can to resist it. That issue of what
happens to faith is the true lesson of the Book of Job. As you can see
from the dialogue at the start happening in the halls of eternity
between God and Lucifer. Lucifer claims that Job only believes because
he has had the charmed life. His faith is of no value because he never
had any reason to doubt it. This is a central reason why God allows
Satan a lease over Job’s life for a season. The test of faith is
absolutely crucial.
In this day and age people’s faith is tested by godlessness in the
media, in the fact that the so-called scientific consensus is so-clled
rationalist, which means that basically society considered as an
acceptable credo only that which can be emoirically proven, and hand in
hand with that puts faith in a very low position – except for when
psychologists state that individuals can get some purely carnal benefit
from it. These days for a person to know God means they have to put
their faith against the sniggerings of know-all atheists from all
quarters. But in Job’s day people were not up against the so-called
rationalists and their fairy tales about evolution and billions of
years and a creator-free origin. People basically knew there was a God,
in that there were no serious voices in society voicing any other
possibility, and so the inner certainty of his existence was not a
difficult thing as today.
And yet God has always used faith as the basis for differentiating this
on his side from those who are not. Works were only ever acceptable as
the fruit of faith, but only faith ever pleased God. It is written that
“without faith it is impossible to please God; for he that cometh to
God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek Him”. So what do we have here with Job? Is the devil
right that Job’s faith is cheap? Or will he make a statement of faith
even after his comforts are stripped from him with all the severity
that the cleansing and trying fuller’s fire of God can muster?
Well, what says the tortured, inmpoverished Job with the rotting flesh,
the dead family?
“For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the
latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this
body, yet in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and
mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed
within me.”-Job 19:25-27.
There we have it. This man, who has been blasted beyond measure, utters
with faith as strong as knowledge, a prophesy of Christ, and of the
Resurrection. And this testimony has gone down as among the most
beautiful words of history, a sentence of incredible value – worth more
than all his possessions.
He was not tried for ever because he did not need to be. After he was
shown to be of faithful integrity and the devil shown up to be a
speculating, fraudulent accuser, everything went back to the way it had
been before.
God was able to bring everything back to normal again.
And of course much more than “normal”.
Just as God is able to wipe every tear from your eye, and will do so one day, if He finds faith in you.
So if you follow that link you should see the whole thread, but just for some context here I’ll include the post just before mine, by Harry, which I basically agree with:
Nola I am with you. I have looked at books that have no Cyrillic and
they are a joke. Even for the absolute beginner, and we all were
there at one time and confused. I think these books are attractive to
some because let’s face it the Cyrillic alphabet is intimidating to a
beginner. If you are serious about learning this beautiful language
don’t waste your money on books like this. Since the language is
purely phonetic it is essential to understand the alphabet before
going very far. This helps a great deal when you hear words and can
recognize verb conjugation or the case of the word which Nola has
pointed out. Unless you recognize these two things you may recognize
the words the other person is saying but you will not have a clue as
what they are trying to communicate. Learning phrases is useless if
you can not understand the person’s response.
I have reviewed a lot of learning programs and of course everybody has
their own preferences. Personally, I am impressed with the Michel
Thomas method. The format is an instructor with a male and female
student as she teaches them. The advantage of this method is that you
get a lot of grammar explanations on the spot for both male and female
verbiage. Hope I it is OK to plug the course here. I would be
interested in Doctor Victor’s input. I love his course and
methodology but the lessons are incomplete. After you are comfortable
with Rl101 and Rl102 you will be hungry for more.
Harry
OK, so here’s my reponse to the thread, not just what Harry said although I do refer to it in one or two points:
There is no point in books on Russian which are simply written in
transcribed Latin letters. I understand why books about Japanese need
to be written first off with romaji, I understand why western learners
of Mandarin need to lean on pinyin for a while. I can see that with
three separate sets of consonants depending on which tone group the
word is in, learners of Thai need to use their own clumsy Latin
transcription system (or pick one of a number of conflicting ones)
I’ll even go so far as to say that because of the lack of vowels
(although you can add them, of course) Arabic and Hebrew learners need
to lean on their own alphabets for a while. The shorter the better.
"Mr Brezhnev, I've seen your name written in a number of different ways, could you tell me what the right one is?" "Sure, comrade. Ze right vay iss ze Russian vay, simply as zat!"
Now you probably DO need to know how to transcribe Russian into
“western” if you intend to go far with it, but then what you need to
know is that each language has its own system for transcribing
Russian. So the person whose eyebrows are similar to mine, and who is
older than me so I can’t even say I thought of them first, is known as
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in the English speaking world, but you just
look at his wikipedia entries, you’ll find the following:
German: Leonid Iljitsch Breschnew
French: Léonid Ilitch Brejnev (you’ll also see them writing the ending
in “eff” in older texts)
Czech: Leonid Iljič Brežněv
Spanish: Leonid Ilich Brézhnev
Polish: Leonid Iljicz Breżniew
Italian: Leonid Il’ič Brežnev (which is bizarre, as those signs aren’t
even part of the Italian language)
Danish: Leonid Iljitj Bresjnev
So while there’s general agreement about the “Leonid” with only the
French dissenting, and that only because of the demands of their
farmers, we have in a sample of eight languages including English,
eight different ways of spelling his patronymic and eight different
ways of spelling his family name!
And they are all quite correct, for the language they are used in.
If there were a single international system for the transliteration of
Russian, a kind of Russian pinyin (there is actually, but only really
used by librarians and people quoting scientific papers) that they
would look after, then there would be a bit more marginal value in
using it to learn, but even in that case it would be stupid, given
that actual cyrillics can be learned so quickly. Thousands have
learned cyrillics off my 101 series. If it’s taking more that two or
three weeks then the person either isn’t getting the method right or
they are not very adept, and either way that gate will prevent those
people wasting their time getting into the meat of the language, which
they probably won’t be able to get their heads round either, if they
baulked at the alphabet, so it’s a mercy for them.
So I just demonstrated that with a book on Russian in English letters,
not only will you not communicate properly in Russia, but also you
won’t communicate properly with people who did the same thing as you
did but coming from other language groups, even neighbouring languages
to ours. So it really is a pointless exercise, other than to make
money for the author, of course, as it’s an easier book to typeset,
and will attract its share of buyers despite being hopeless,
especially if they are not honest enough to describe online or in the
paper catalogue the absence of proper cyrillics.
Thankfully with things like Amazon we have the opportunity to add our
own reviews, and I’d really encourage you to flag up any language
books which don’t teach proper literacy. Both in Russian and in any
other language – the new TY series have removed proper literacy from a
number of their books and this really deserves to be flagged.
That doesn’t mean that audio only courses like Pimsleur or the
superior Michel Thomas method by Natasha Bershadski (should be –
dskaya, of course, which is not a great start – I hope she doesn’t
teach the language that way getting the genders of adjectives all
wrong) which Harry talks about hoping I won’t mind (of course not!)
are not valuable. They might be a nice entry-level way to see if you
like the sound and the kind of structures that you have ahead before
you ever put pero to bumaga in Russian. What the course consists of
I’ll come to in a second
I got told off by my friend Harold Goodman (I hope he’s still my
friend!) who did Michel Thomas’ Mandarin Course for suggesting in a
forum ways in which these courses could be available for less than the
cover price, and given that the cover prices of all MT courses fell on
Amazon by 30% (looks like what I was saying and some others too
started filtering back to Hodder) and given that you have to
appreciate the work the authors and everyone else put into this, and
most overridingly given that there won’t be any more courses in the
new series of MT if they’re not making money, and I seriously want
Harold to make the Hebrew course, I shall not be giving that advice
out any more. If you know it, you know it – and if you don’t, you
don’t. If you want something free, what’s on Youtube is free.
A course like Michel Thomas method contains generally 8 CDs of about
an hour in length for the foundation course. The first two of these
will be a repetition of the two CDs in the introductory course, hence
the latter is not worth buying unless all you want is an answer to the
question whether the method works for you or not. I’ll give you the
answer to that, if it doesn’t work, nothing will, so just go ahead and
buy the foundation course, especially while it’s 30% off. After this
you get an “advanced” course (it’s not really “advanced”, off course,
expect in comparison with the foundation course) and that has 4 CDs
with the pace slightly upped so that you really score as much vocab
again off the advanced course as you did on the Foundation course. And
then after that you get for most languages a vocab course (for Greek
there isn’t a vocab MT course but the authress has craftily made her
own Chinnor-based vocab book and CD set and Amazon sells it of course
as a set with her two MT products) and in the case of MT Russian you
get 4 CDs. And you are getting drilled on the vocab as it emerges –
you are using it in sentences that also reinforce recently learned
vocab.
So if you take the three together you have 16 hours of recordings.
Used properly, ie with the pause button, you’re going to use 50 hours
of your time or more to go through the three level course. Equivalent
class room time would have cost a good deal more of course, but you
would have been able to ask questions. But I’m really no fan of the
language classroom, not as an efficient means of learning languages,
anyhow, however pleasant and collegial it may be.
And maybe we can say that Pareto’s rule has applied to MT’s method
course, that these 50 hours, spent efficiently, will give you 80% of
what 250 hours of conventional learning would have given. That may be
a bit overgenerous on my part, as I am still not convinced that a lot
of what goes on in the lessons isn’t going into the short term memory.
Only a staged presentation system that goes over two weeks can really
tell you that. But on the other hand if you don’t rush at a Michel
Thomas course like a bull in a china shop, but take it relaxed, and go
back after two weeks and check you can still do it – don’t try to
learn while you are doing it – then you may well find that the key
drivers of the goldlist method as regards short and long term memory
can also come into play in the MT method.
However, all of this still only gets you, regardless of the ambitious
names of the courses, at a level where you will be close to entry
point once you start actually writing in Russian. If you did the MT
course, you’ll feel a familiarity with the words when you come to
write them. While doing the MT course, an absolute beginner might do
my RL 101 which keeps the actual Russian content intentionally low for
the first half – those cyrillics equally well apply to almost all
languages written in cyrillics. And then that beginner should drill
the Russian alphabet as I say, by writing his own language in
cyrillics. Or they can learn (using Wikipedia, for example, or Google
translate) how place names and personal names are transcribed into
cyrillics by Russians. That will be a very good drill for cyrillics,
as well as be useful for the future for the learner to know, but won’t
conflict much with what the MT tutor Natasha is presenting the MT way.
It’s coming in from a wholly different direction.
Then when you finish all that MT has to offer and also feel really
comfortable with cyrillics as a writing system, then you go an get a
nice, traditional book and put the two together, or you can watch what
there is of my RL 102 course, an unfinished work as we all know, and
go to the course book from there.
Before I finish I will say that a learner’s book should have the
cyrillics with stresses on the stressed vowels and the two dots on the
‘yo’, but also make it clear to students that they shouldn’t get used
to them. I decided in the video course that as I was sitting there
giving the pronunciation for the words on screen anyway, that neither
of these crutches were necessary, and so it is in real Russian. Which
you may say is ironic.
Here is the The Book of Samson and Dallillah (the second book of the Usenet Apocrypha, the first being The Book of Aaron, also available on this site. The third book, The Wisdom of David is lost and efforts are being made to uncover it for the readership of Huliganov TV.
Prelude
The Book of Samson and Dallillah is believed to be, along with the other Books that make up the Apocrypha of Yuzneth, a lost portion of the Book of Mormon, having fallen out of Joseph Smith’s pocket as he was walking back from the hill to the village of Manchester, Ontario County, which, by a cosmic misunderstanding, fell through a kink in the space time continuum and ended up in Manchester England 159 years later and was offered for sale to me by a man in a white van as I was taking petrol at Knutsford Service Station. I didn’t get his number.
Those modern day mormons who became aware of the existence of this
book naturally wished to acquire it, but the angel Moroni came to me
in a vision during an advert break on telly as I was enjoying a nice
cup of coffee and gave me to understand that they had had their
chance and blew it when Joe Smith let it fall out of his pocket,
especially since they didn’t drink caffeine based hot drinks as God
had commanded to the remnant of the human race at the time of Noah,
and that now it was my turn, as a linguist and coffee addict, to have
a go with the Urim and Thummim, and translate the plates, and the
mormons were not to have them for any money, or all the tea in China.
And so, without further ado, here is The Book of Samson and
Dallillah.
Chapter One
1. As it is written in the Book of Psalms, ‘Blessed is the man
that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the
way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in His law doth
he meditate day and night’.
3. There was indeed one who was such in the land of Yuzneth, and
verily he was like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that
bringeth forth his fruit in his season
4. And his scroll of answers to oft asked questions came forth as
an offering to the people of the temple each time that the moon was
full.
5. And he was a leader, as a lodestone amongst men, and he did
establish the Assembly of the Righteous, and did give them laws in
the Scroll, which was called Nethi-Keth. Continue reading “The Book of Samson and Dallillah”→
The “Book Of Aaron” is part of the UsenetApocrypha, a number of books written by me in the 1990s satirising the soap opera that went on in various Usenet discussion groups or newsgroups, some of whose participants were real people airing their linen, and others where personae there to troll or participate in the rough and tumble of Usenet discussion (read: “flamewars“). Some of the flamewars were productive of quite creative writing, and in this case I used the Jacobean English of the King James Bible (no disrespect to the Bible itself intended of course, it is merely the humour to be had from juxtaposing this classical and religious form of English on the life and views of a handful of eccentric guys and girls living in modern America) to produce some Usenet Apocrypha celebrating and combining some of the amusing stories that had been discussed on the group over recent months, in particular those of usenet legend Aaron Kulkis, described by many as the Ubertroll. Whether he genuinely believed his chauvinistic beliefs nobody can say, but he was a real person who came to see me in London in 1998. For those who don’t know the people involved, I have know idea whether the book will still be a laugh or not, or make any sense or not. You tell me!
Chapter One
1. This is the history of the prophet Aaron son of Kulkis, which beginneth when he was yet unborn.
2. In the land of Po the LORD looked over the people to see if there were any righteous and not sunken in iniquity. And behold, one Kulkis of the ancient tribe of Lith did walk uprightly.
3. And the LORD came unto him in a vision by night and said unto him ‘Gird up thy loins and betake thee and all thine house unto a land which is afar off, a land that I, the LORD thy God will shew thee’.
4. And Kulkis did exceedingly fear and shake before the countenance of the LORD and great were the movements of his bowels. Continue reading “The Book of Aaron”→
