Digenis.org

I said I’d post some quick observations on the Ukrainian language. All I have time for now:

• I mentioned in the last post that it can be humorous for Russian-speakers to see and hear Ukrainian. When walking down the streets and seeing signs that read продукти, пошта, and Ñ�лухай it’s easy to think you’re in a country of poor spellers.
• One thing that you’ll notice quickly about Ukrainian is that, unlike Russian, it lacks o in closed syllables. For example, when you enter the metro you’ll see the word вхід on the door. “Oh, вход becomes вхід.â€� I thought to myself. Of course, I was a little confused when I saw немає входу (no entrance). When I saw a few more examples, like він, вона, and воно (he, she, and it) and рік and році (nominative and locative year) it became clear to me that the o can come back when the noun is declined. Interesting.
• One of the first words I picked up in Ukrainian was Ñ�мачно, which means ‘tasty’. I’m guessing it came through Polish smak from German schmack (flavour). In Russian there’s the word вкуÑ�но/вкуÑ�ный for tasty, but there’s also the more colloquial variant Ñ�мачный and the verb Ñ�маковать, which means to savour or relish something . Also, youth these days use the slangish Ñ�мачно to mean cool.
• Україно моÑ� мила! Ukrainian is the only East Slavic language to have retained the vocative case

My curiosity is certainly sparked. I’ll be taking a look at Ukrainian language (but no, I’m not attempting to learn it; my hands are full with Russian) and grammar in the next few weeks. It’s disputed history is of great interest to me.

Bart Kosko’s latest book, Noise, spits in the face of punctuation standards. Kosko has decided that commas are merely a form of ‘channel noise’ and will no longer use them in his writing. He says that ‘it keeps you from getting to the verbs fast enough.’ Idiotic, if you ask me; I’d think his book would be painful to read. As Liberman at Language Log put it, ‘why not leave out the spaces, too, andgettothoseverbsevenfaster?’

Are there any non-English based programming languages? Why, yes there are.

Here are a few Dilbert comics strips published in Russian by Bolshoi Gorod

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Oxford Etymologist Anatoly Liberman takes a look at the erratic monosyllabic/disylalbic behavior of -ED in English adjectives. “English is rather consistent in differentiating he has aged ~ an aged man, she is blessed with excellent health ~ a blessed woman, I hate the way you ragged me ~ ragged clothes….We can only say that English has a tendency to keep adjectives and verbal forms apart, but, as always, some forms have fallen through the cracks.”

How Bilingual Brains Switch Between Tongues: “…the left caudate becomes more active as people shift from thinking in one language to another. This area is thought to influence how we articulate words in association with another brain structure known as the thalamus.”

An International Phonetic Alphabet chart in Unicode and XHTML/CSS.