peter the potty-mouthed and those unruly abkhazians
You can see old versions of Cyrillic in relatively recent documents, but to get the full effect it's best to look at the language known as Old Church Slavonic (O.C.S.). It's the medieval ancestor of a bunch of Slavic languages like Russian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian and so on.
A century or so later, it's thought that Cyril's followers used Glagolitic as their base for developing the old Cyrillic script above, and it took hold in most areas where Slavic languages were spoken (though it seems that Glagolitic survived for much longer in what is now Croatia).
Ultimately, though, I think the fun part is not the presence of familiar characters in Cyrillic, but the presence of unfamiliar ones. There are about twenty of these in Russian, which is not a lot really. I've already enthused in a previous entry about my personal favourite "ж", which I once heard described as "the pleasure symbol", because it sounds like the "s" in pleasure. But there are plenty of others I like too.
Having said that, some of these characters definitely cause their share of "Aaarghh!!!" moments for the learner. For example, щ is pronounced something like "shch" (as in the word borshch), but the balance between the "sh" and the "ch" has to be exactly right, and you need to bare your teeth a little to make it work. Almost every time I consciously practise щ, I find a new way of getting it wrong.
Then there's ь (called the "soft sign"), which is quite an odd fish in that it has no sound of its own; rather, it tells you to make the previous sound softer by doing a little backwards movement with your tongue, rather fetchingly known as a 'retroflex'. This can take quite a while to get the hang of ... but when you do master it, you'll be pretty damn pleased with yourself :-)
The closely related б (sounds like /b/) and в (sounds like /v/) can be confusing too, but the one that really screws people up is the humble т. It sounds the same as in English, but when it's stylised, italicised or handwritten, it becomes т. This leads to an unholy triumvirate of confusion, whereby:
Cyrillic т = Roman "t"
Cyrillic м = Roman "m", but
Cyrillic т = Roman "t"
You see what I mean. After years of living in Russian-speaking countries, I still sometimes find myself staring at words that contain м or т or both, to make sure that I'm reading them correctly. You can imagine the potential for confusion if we had the same thing in English ... you could be browsing in a sports shop, when suddenly a sign catches your eye and you think "Hey, does that say baseball mits, or did the rules of baseball get a lot more interesting since last time I checked?"
*ahem*
Sorry ... sometimes you just have to give in to the smutty humour impulse.
Last characters I want to mention – because they're also among my favourites – are the ones which look super-Cyrillic, like ы and ъ. I really like these, because somehow for me they create a little visual link to some of the more arcane-looking characters you see in Orthodox churches, on old monuments, and other places where old-fashioned script is used.
Of all the sounds in Russian, ы is possibly the most difficult for foreigners to pronounce. It's another area where I still struggle, especially when I have to spell words out loud. For this reason, I often call it "the sixty-one" rather than naming it.
To get an idea of how to pronounce the sixty-one, start by saying the word "elephant" a few times. Notice how, because of stress, the second "e" is quite different from the first. For want of a better description, the initial "e" receives all of the 'flavour', leaving the second one as little more than a featureless grunt separating some adjacent consonants.
This kind of flavourless vowel appears in all heavily stressed languages, especially English, and it has no standard spelling. (If you think about words like "manipulative", for example, you may notice that the only fully pronounced vowels are the /I/ sounds. The other three vowels are all little grunts, two spelled "a" and one spelled "u".)
In fact, the flavourless vowel sound has a special name in phonetics: it's called a schwa, and bizarre though this may seem, it's actually the most common sound in the whole English language.
Isn't that weird?
Oops, sidetracked again ... back to Russian.
So you've got the unstressed "e" sound from elephant (written /ə/ in phonetic transcription, as though it's stuck on its back like a cockroach tipped upside down). The next bit is a /j/, like the first sound in the word "yes" .
To put them together, try saying ə-yes, ə-yes. Remember the /ə/ should be a schwa – a vowel with no flavour.
When you've done that a few times, stop saying the "-es" part of ə-yes. Just get to the y, and stop.
In phonetic transcription, the sound you're saying now is /əj/. It's not exactly like Russian ы, but it's reasonably close. So well done ... you've come a long way towards pronouncing the most difficult sound in Russian!
Now you're ready to use some of this knowledge. Here are the Russian words for "frog" and "fish":
frog: жаба
fish: рыба
Just to recap:
ж = a 'zh' sound; б = a 'b' sound; р = an 'r' sound.
To make it a bit more authentic, you can roll the "р" very briefly, as Russians generally do. This makes рыба a lot more bouncy and exciting: think of Spanish "ariba", stress it on the "ры", and start with an exuberant little flourish. Once you've mastered this, put the two words together and shout them from your balcony a few times.
What you've got here is the ideal tool to derail almost any boring conversation. When discourse becomes dull and you find yourself entrapped, just shout жаба-рыба!!! in a triumphant voice. You'll instantly get the focus back on yourself, allowing you to control what happens next. If someone asks a question like "What the Hell was that?", just say "frogfish" in a completely matter-of-fact tone, as if it were the most natural conversational link in the world. Whatever the previous topic was, it will now be completely forgotten. You're free to continue with "So anyway, ...", and begin talking about what you want to talk about. It's a guaranteed method.
The thing is, though, I've been talking about Russian and other Slavic languages so far, and of course these are the languages associated with Cyrillic in most people's minds. In actual fact, though, the large majority of languages written in Cyrillic characters are not Slavic at all.
You have to remember that the USSR covered about 25% of the Earth's landmass in its day, and before that you had the Tsarist Russian Empire, which was also rather staggeringly huge. Both of those entities reached into some of the most remote and unfamiliar territories in the world – places populated by literally hundreds of ethnic groups, many of which you and I have never heard of. Mainly as a result of this, many of the peoples who use Cyrillic script are in possession of some excitingly weird and exotic languages.
To start with, you've got the far north of Russia and neighbouring Finland, where you can find a variety of obscure 'arctic' tongues that have been around for ... well, a very long time. An example is Kildin Sami, formerly called Lappish. It's one of a few languages spoken on the Kola Peninsula, a wild frozen region separating the Barents Sea from Finnish Karelia. The number of Kildin Sami native speakers is tiny – something like 600 – but this almost-unknown language has managed to contribute at least one word to English: тундра (tundra). And so far, it seems to be hanging in there, in a world which has lost about half of its minor languages in the last century.
Heading much further south, you get your wacky Caucasian tongues, which appear to disobey just about every rule of phonetics that applies in the rest of the world. Among these is Abkhaz, which may have as many as 300,000 speakers (though no-one is really sure). It's quite an oddity due to its exceptionally large range of consonants, which seems to make it a poor fit for just about any alphabet.
Abkhaz has adopted and then thrown off various writing systems in the last 150 years or so. The problem seems to be that every time someone tries to introduce a new Abkhaz alphabet, it turns out that there are more distinct consonant sounds requiring their own separate characters than was previously thought. At one point, for example, Abkhazians felt it necessary to replace a 37-character Cyrillic script with another one containing 55 characters. Under the influence of linguistic anthropologists from abroad, this in turn was replaced by an even more extensive Roman script, with an incredible seventy-five characters. That's forty-nine Roman letters that we don't have in English – basically two whole extra alphabets!
I'd love to have been there when the orthographers*** were putting together this outlandishly supersized Roman script for Abkhaz. There surely must have been a point in time when they started thinking "Oh come on, you can't possibly have any more consonants! You're just making them up now!"
(And the Abkhazians giggled conspiratorially amongst themselves, as bespectacled British scholars scratched their heads and adjusted their reading glasses in consternation. "Adjir, come and check this out! These Britishers are as gullible as a Georgian farm boy. We just told them that we have four different kinds of 'f ' sound ... and they believed us!")****
Saddest of all, the linguists' 75-character behemoth lasted for about three years and was then replaced – which, incidentally, made it only slightly less long-lived than the system that came before it.
After an experiment with the wonderfully squiggly Georgian alphabet, Abkhazians again reverted to a modification of Cyrillic. They're still using it, as far as I'm aware ... but who knows? Maybe one day they'll throw it out, and torture some more orthographers in the quest for a 100-character script. That would be quite an achievement :-)
As you head down into Central Asia, you start to come across the Turkic languages, one of which I do actually know something about: namely Kazakh. Mind you, when I say "know", I'm only referring to that weirdly abstract (and from a certain point of view, utterly useless) linguist's knowledge of a language. This kind of familiarity doesn't mean that you can actually speak the language; all it means is that you can describe, and perhaps appreciate it. In some ways, it's rather hollow.
All self-pity aside, though, you might expect that Kazakh and its sister languages would have some wonderfully peculiar features ... and yeah, they do. One of my favourites is something known as 'vowel harmony' – a system whereby vowels organise into groups, then hang out exclusively with fellow group members while generally shunning the company of other vowels. In practical terms, this might mean that you can never have an /a/ and a /u:/ in the same word, because they belong to separate groups.
Why would a language do this? Well, the members of each group are usually similar in some way, like all being produced in one part of the mouth, or all requiring a rounding of the lips. Herding them together therefore means that the sounds in a single word 'harmonise' with each other like notes in a musical chord. Some may argue that harmony achieved through separation is basically phonetic apartheid, but fans of vowel harmony (which also occurs in a couple of European tongues, Finnish being the most well-known) write about it in positively inspired and poetic terms.
Worrying analogies or not, if vowel harmony can produce words like "балалар" (balalar), then I'm for it. This is my favourite Kazakh word, as several of you have heard me say in the past. It means "children", and it's just perfect for the job. Let me demonstrate:
"So what did you get up to on Sunday?"
"Oh, nothing much. The wife went to visit her mum in hospital, so my job was to stay at home with three noisy kids and try to keep their balalar under control".
Great, isn't it? I think we should import it into English.
Kazakh also makes distinctions between aspirated and unaspirated consonants. To understand this, try making a /t/ sound a few times, and notice where your tongue goes. It starts out in contact with a ridge of bone just above your front teeth, and when you release it, a little puff of air escapes your lips. The puff of air is the 'aspiration'. If you try, though, you'll find it's possible to perform all the other moves involved in producing a /t/ without letting any air out. This is unaspirated /t/, considered to be a completely distinct sound in quite a few languages.
The effect of this really depends on your personal taste. For example, "no" in Kazakh is жоқ (zhok), but with an unaspirated қ which makes the word stop suddenly, as though you've slammed on the brakes mid-speech. It either sounds crisp and cheery or abrupt and impolite, depending on who's speaking and on how much affinity you feel towards the sound of Kazakh in general. Personally, I rather like it.
Because of this and various other features, Cyrillic script has to be adapted somewhat to fit the Kazakh sound inventory. Some standard Russian characters aren't used (or are reserved for foreign loan words, just as English-speakers only use the é in café for imported words), some are adapted to represent Kazakh (rather than Russian) sounds, and an extra nine characters have been added.
To my eyes, these extras make Kazakh writing seem pleasantly 'fancy'. When I see it, I often feel like I'm reading something a bit special, like a friendly greeting card or a decorative sign. Here are two Kazkakh phrases, "Magan diriger kerek" (I need a doctor) and "Bul qansa turadi" (How much is it?). See what you think:
Маған дәрігер керек
Бұл қанша тұрады
I think it's mostly the ұ that does it, though I also like the tail on the қ.
Ok ... I'm about to finish up this entry, having covered just a tiny fraction of all the languages written in Cyrillic. The subject, as you can see, is pretty huge. And I guess by now you've all concluded that I'm either
a) really quite obsessed by this whole Cyrillic thing,
b) just a complete nut, or
c) both.
Whichever option you chose, you're probably right.
I hope that I've communicated here some of the joy I experience when familiarising myself with another writing system, and also shown that doing so can occasionally provide little windows onto parts of the world that we don't know so much about. Failing that, I hope you at least enjoyed the 'drunken Tsar chronicles'. There are plenty more out there if you're interested.
I'll conclude this series of rambles with one more entry, probably some time next month. In the meatime ...
C НОВЫМ ГОДОМ!!
(s novym godom = happy new year!!)
* I didn't actually know much about Peter before I wrote this. Got some of my info from About.com, some from the 'In Your Pocket' guide to St Petersburg (named after guess-who), and the rest was just bits and pieces gleaned from reading around on the net and talking to a few people.
*** Orthographers are people who study writing systems and, if they're very lucky, occasionally have a chance to invent them.
**** Actually the linguist who devised the Roman script was half-Russian, half-Georgian ... but why let the truth spoil a cheesy joke, eh?
I want to share a silly memory with you.
It was some time around the Millennium, and I was sitting in my living room in Summer Hill (a suburb of Sydney), watching a documentary. I don't remember the exact subject now – something related to WWII or Communism, I guess. But I clearly remember the presenter talking about the comings and goings of a certain Mr Jo Stalin.
Footage was shown of a steam locomotive which had the word "Stalin" written on the front in large Cyrillic letters. Apparently this was the Communist leader's state-of-the-art private train, cleverly decorated with his name so that when it passed by, assassins would know that the moment had come to detonate their explosives.
Footage was shown of a steam locomotive which had the word "Stalin" written on the front in large Cyrillic letters. Apparently this was the Communist leader's state-of-the-art private train, cleverly decorated with his name so that when it passed by, assassins would know that the moment had come to detonate their explosives.
Most vividly, though, I remember thinking to myself that the Cyrillic letters looked just awesomely cool, and right then and there, I decided that I would learn how to read them.
A while later I bought a beginner's Russian book, and some time after that I attended an eight-lesson evening course. This was well before I knew that I was going to live in Russia or any other country where this knowledge might actually be useful. I had no reason at all to learn the language, except that I was curious – especially about the alphabet.
You don't learn much in eight lessons, of course, but afterwards I had at least a tenuous toe-hold. I'd mastered greetings and thanks, learned the names of some everyday objects, been acquainted with genders and cases (don't get me started about those!), memorised a few key phrases like "Do you know where ----- is?" and so on. Most importantly, though, I'd reached the stage where I could just about read and write Russian Cyrillic ... a fact which made me extremely happy )))
A bunch of years later, I still struggle to hold a conversation in Russian – it's a fearsomely difficult language to learn, and I haven't exactly had oceans of spare time in which to study it over the past few years. Plus, I'll admit that laziness has been a factor. However, regardless of all that, my love affair with Cyrillic script continues undiminished. Every time I write my shopping list or add an entry to my vocabulary notebook, I get a special kind of pleasure from forming these characters with my own hand. I'm not sure why exactly; it's just fun.
Maddeningly complicated though the Russian language may be, Cyrillic script itself is quite easy to learn if you already know Roman letters. Some of the characters are easily recognisable, and even with those that aren't, there's at least a kind of familiarity to their form and proportion, and in how they position themselves relative to a line. So in comparison to, say, the serpentine loops of Thai or the inscrutible calligraphic shapes of Arabic, they're not that challenging.
This wasn't always so, and for a lot of the modern-day similarities between Roman and Cyrillic writing, we have one man to thank: the six-foot-eight, hard-drinking, filthy joke-loving, wildly blaspheming and perpetually sleep-deprived Tsar Peter The Great. When not pulling his son across the floor by the hair, forcing guests to join him in week-long vodka marathons, or scouring Europe for people with interesting deformities who might be persuaded to join his court (Siamese Twins were his favourite), Peter somehow found time to embark on a massive program of modernisation in Russia. As part of this program, he decided that the medieval Cyrillic writing system should be dragged into the modern era.
More about the irresistibly weird and wanton Peter in a sec; first let's have a look at two of the wild'n'funky alphabets that modern Cyrillic replaced. Why? Well, partly to get an idea of what you might be up against if you were forced to learn one of them ... but mostly just because they're pretty ;-)
This wasn't always so, and for a lot of the modern-day similarities between Roman and Cyrillic writing, we have one man to thank: the six-foot-eight, hard-drinking, filthy joke-loving, wildly blaspheming and perpetually sleep-deprived Tsar Peter The Great. When not pulling his son across the floor by the hair, forcing guests to join him in week-long vodka marathons, or scouring Europe for people with interesting deformities who might be persuaded to join his court (Siamese Twins were his favourite), Peter somehow found time to embark on a massive program of modernisation in Russia. As part of this program, he decided that the medieval Cyrillic writing system should be dragged into the modern era.
More about the irresistibly weird and wanton Peter in a sec; first let's have a look at two of the wild'n'funky alphabets that modern Cyrillic replaced. Why? Well, partly to get an idea of what you might be up against if you were forced to learn one of them ... but mostly just because they're pretty ;-)
You can see old versions of Cyrillic in relatively recent documents, but to get the full effect it's best to look at the language known as Old Church Slavonic (O.C.S.). It's the medieval ancestor of a bunch of Slavic languages like Russian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian and so on.
This alphabet is definitely learnable, but it presents a few challenges that modern Cyrillic doesn't. When used in written discourse it was full of weird ligatures (linking or fusing together two characters, often with unrecognisable results), the vertical balance is quite unusual in places, and taken all together, it looks a lot more like a medieval script than a modern one. Which it, y'know, is.
Incidentally, most people who use Cyrillic script in their everyday lives will tell you that the original alphabet was devised by two Bulgarian monks, the revered Saint Cyril and his brother Methodius. In fact, some of the available evidence tends to undermine this view. According to some scholarly sources, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-script-inventing brothers actually developed a far more alien-looking set of characters called Glagolitic, basing their ideas on the Greek alphabet.
A century or so later, it's thought that Cyril's followers used Glagolitic as their base for developing the old Cyrillic script above, and it took hold in most areas where Slavic languages were spoken (though it seems that Glagolitic survived for much longer in what is now Croatia).
So yeah ... that's the potted history, and it's all fairly linear and logical – except, of course, for the bit where some proud mum and dad in Bulgaria exclaimed "Let's name the boy Methodius!". Hard to imagine the thought process which led to that; might as well have called him Techniquolas or MacSidekick, really.
Anyway, as I mentioned before, the big break from these arcane-looking alphabets came in the 18th Century with Peter. This is quite appropriate really, given that he was in many ways the prototypical Russian ruler: a volatile mixture of grand visions for his nation, strange personal obsessions (he's probably the only European monarch to have practised dentistry as a hobby, and almost certainly the only one to have filled a sack with teeth he'd extracted and stashed it under his bed), and most of all, belligerent disrespect for any authority apart from his own.
Peter was especially fond of mocking the church, bolstering the belief of some Russian peasants that he was in fact the Antichrist. In one rambunctious episode, he organised a profane re-enactment of Jesus' return to Jerusalem by strapping a few intoxicated friends to donkeys and camels, riding to an inn, acting out a parody of the biblical scene, and then drinking for several days. Pleased with the results, he then publicly declared his rabble "The Most Drunken Synod" and wrote rules for its future meetings*.
Peter was especially fond of mocking the church, bolstering the belief of some Russian peasants that he was in fact the Antichrist. In one rambunctious episode, he organised a profane re-enactment of Jesus' return to Jerusalem by strapping a few intoxicated friends to donkeys and camels, riding to an inn, acting out a parody of the biblical scene, and then drinking for several days. Pleased with the results, he then publicly declared his rabble "The Most Drunken Synod" and wrote rules for its future meetings*.
Personally I've always admired a man who can start up a new religious organisation while on a bender and get himself declared the Antichrist.
More to the point of this entry, though, Peter insisted that the basic architecture of Cyrillic letters should be 'westernised'. By that, he didn't mean that he wanted to replace them with Roman letters – rather, he wanted the Cyrillic letters to be adapted somewhat, to make them more uniform in their dimensions and in the way they behave on a page. So nowadays, if you want to learn, say, Russian, nearly all of the 33 characters you need to know look kinda familiar in their basic architecture. Even better, some of them are 'freebies', in that they're exactly the same as Roman letters.
As an example, one of the first Russian words I ever learned was мак, which means "poppy". Seems an odd place in the lexicon to start your learning, until someone points out that every letter in мак is written and pronounced the same way in English as in Russian. So if you can remember this tiny word, you're already 10% literate. Next you can add the mildly amusing сок (pronounced like "sock" and meaning "juice"). You'll notice here that o retains its Latin sound**, and с sounds like it does in English "cent". And so on it goes.
Before long, you're ready to start taking on longer words like ресторан. To make sense of this, you just need to know that there are a few letters which appear in both Roman and Cyrillic scripts, but which correspond to a different sound in each. In this word, you've got two of them:
Cyrillic р = Roman "r"
Cyrillic н = Roman "n"
With this in mind, you should be able to work out that ресторан translates as "a place where you pay lots of money for the privilege of not having to wash up after you eat".
Ultimately, though, I think the fun part is not the presence of familiar characters in Cyrillic, but the presence of unfamiliar ones. There are about twenty of these in Russian, which is not a lot really. I've already enthused in a previous entry about my personal favourite "ж", which I once heard described as "the pleasure symbol", because it sounds like the "s" in pleasure. But there are plenty of others I like too.
Having said that, some of these characters definitely cause their share of "Aaarghh!!!" moments for the learner. For example, щ is pronounced something like "shch" (as in the word borshch), but the balance between the "sh" and the "ch" has to be exactly right, and you need to bare your teeth a little to make it work. Almost every time I consciously practise щ, I find a new way of getting it wrong.
Then there's ь (called the "soft sign"), which is quite an odd fish in that it has no sound of its own; rather, it tells you to make the previous sound softer by doing a little backwards movement with your tongue, rather fetchingly known as a 'retroflex'. This can take quite a while to get the hang of ... but when you do master it, you'll be pretty damn pleased with yourself :-)
The closely related б (sounds like /b/) and в (sounds like /v/) can be confusing too, but the one that really screws people up is the humble т. It sounds the same as in English, but when it's stylised, italicised or handwritten, it becomes т. This leads to an unholy triumvirate of confusion, whereby:
Cyrillic т = Roman "t"
Cyrillic м = Roman "m", but
Cyrillic т = Roman "t"
You see what I mean. After years of living in Russian-speaking countries, I still sometimes find myself staring at words that contain м or т or both, to make sure that I'm reading them correctly. You can imagine the potential for confusion if we had the same thing in English ... you could be browsing in a sports shop, when suddenly a sign catches your eye and you think "Hey, does that say baseball mits, or did the rules of baseball get a lot more interesting since last time I checked?"
*ahem*
Sorry ... sometimes you just have to give in to the smutty humour impulse.
Last characters I want to mention – because they're also among my favourites – are the ones which look super-Cyrillic, like ы and ъ. I really like these, because somehow for me they create a little visual link to some of the more arcane-looking characters you see in Orthodox churches, on old monuments, and other places where old-fashioned script is used.
Of all the sounds in Russian, ы is possibly the most difficult for foreigners to pronounce. It's another area where I still struggle, especially when I have to spell words out loud. For this reason, I often call it "the sixty-one" rather than naming it.
To get an idea of how to pronounce the sixty-one, start by saying the word "elephant" a few times. Notice how, because of stress, the second "e" is quite different from the first. For want of a better description, the initial "e" receives all of the 'flavour', leaving the second one as little more than a featureless grunt separating some adjacent consonants.
This kind of flavourless vowel appears in all heavily stressed languages, especially English, and it has no standard spelling. (If you think about words like "manipulative", for example, you may notice that the only fully pronounced vowels are the /I/ sounds. The other three vowels are all little grunts, two spelled "a" and one spelled "u".)
In fact, the flavourless vowel sound has a special name in phonetics: it's called a schwa, and bizarre though this may seem, it's actually the most common sound in the whole English language.
Isn't that weird?
Oops, sidetracked again ... back to Russian.
So you've got the unstressed "e" sound from elephant (written /ə/ in phonetic transcription, as though it's stuck on its back like a cockroach tipped upside down). The next bit is a /j/, like the first sound in the word "yes" .
To put them together, try saying ə-yes, ə-yes. Remember the /ə/ should be a schwa – a vowel with no flavour.
When you've done that a few times, stop saying the "-es" part of ə-yes. Just get to the y, and stop.
In phonetic transcription, the sound you're saying now is /əj/. It's not exactly like Russian ы, but it's reasonably close. So well done ... you've come a long way towards pronouncing the most difficult sound in Russian!
Now you're ready to use some of this knowledge. Here are the Russian words for "frog" and "fish":
frog: жаба
fish: рыба
Just to recap:
ж = a 'zh' sound; б = a 'b' sound; р = an 'r' sound.
To make it a bit more authentic, you can roll the "р" very briefly, as Russians generally do. This makes рыба a lot more bouncy and exciting: think of Spanish "ariba", stress it on the "ры", and start with an exuberant little flourish. Once you've mastered this, put the two words together and shout them from your balcony a few times.
What you've got here is the ideal tool to derail almost any boring conversation. When discourse becomes dull and you find yourself entrapped, just shout жаба-рыба!!! in a triumphant voice. You'll instantly get the focus back on yourself, allowing you to control what happens next. If someone asks a question like "What the Hell was that?", just say "frogfish" in a completely matter-of-fact tone, as if it were the most natural conversational link in the world. Whatever the previous topic was, it will now be completely forgotten. You're free to continue with "So anyway, ...", and begin talking about what you want to talk about. It's a guaranteed method.
The thing is, though, I've been talking about Russian and other Slavic languages so far, and of course these are the languages associated with Cyrillic in most people's minds. In actual fact, though, the large majority of languages written in Cyrillic characters are not Slavic at all.
You have to remember that the USSR covered about 25% of the Earth's landmass in its day, and before that you had the Tsarist Russian Empire, which was also rather staggeringly huge. Both of those entities reached into some of the most remote and unfamiliar territories in the world – places populated by literally hundreds of ethnic groups, many of which you and I have never heard of. Mainly as a result of this, many of the peoples who use Cyrillic script are in possession of some excitingly weird and exotic languages.
To start with, you've got the far north of Russia and neighbouring Finland, where you can find a variety of obscure 'arctic' tongues that have been around for ... well, a very long time. An example is Kildin Sami, formerly called Lappish. It's one of a few languages spoken on the Kola Peninsula, a wild frozen region separating the Barents Sea from Finnish Karelia. The number of Kildin Sami native speakers is tiny – something like 600 – but this almost-unknown language has managed to contribute at least one word to English: тундра (tundra). And so far, it seems to be hanging in there, in a world which has lost about half of its minor languages in the last century.
Heading much further south, you get your wacky Caucasian tongues, which appear to disobey just about every rule of phonetics that applies in the rest of the world. Among these is Abkhaz, which may have as many as 300,000 speakers (though no-one is really sure). It's quite an oddity due to its exceptionally large range of consonants, which seems to make it a poor fit for just about any alphabet.
Abkhaz has adopted and then thrown off various writing systems in the last 150 years or so. The problem seems to be that every time someone tries to introduce a new Abkhaz alphabet, it turns out that there are more distinct consonant sounds requiring their own separate characters than was previously thought. At one point, for example, Abkhazians felt it necessary to replace a 37-character Cyrillic script with another one containing 55 characters. Under the influence of linguistic anthropologists from abroad, this in turn was replaced by an even more extensive Roman script, with an incredible seventy-five characters. That's forty-nine Roman letters that we don't have in English – basically two whole extra alphabets!
I'd love to have been there when the orthographers*** were putting together this outlandishly supersized Roman script for Abkhaz. There surely must have been a point in time when they started thinking "Oh come on, you can't possibly have any more consonants! You're just making them up now!"
(And the Abkhazians giggled conspiratorially amongst themselves, as bespectacled British scholars scratched their heads and adjusted their reading glasses in consternation. "Adjir, come and check this out! These Britishers are as gullible as a Georgian farm boy. We just told them that we have four different kinds of 'f ' sound ... and they believed us!")****
Saddest of all, the linguists' 75-character behemoth lasted for about three years and was then replaced – which, incidentally, made it only slightly less long-lived than the system that came before it.
After an experiment with the wonderfully squiggly Georgian alphabet, Abkhazians again reverted to a modification of Cyrillic. They're still using it, as far as I'm aware ... but who knows? Maybe one day they'll throw it out, and torture some more orthographers in the quest for a 100-character script. That would be quite an achievement :-)
As you head down into Central Asia, you start to come across the Turkic languages, one of which I do actually know something about: namely Kazakh. Mind you, when I say "know", I'm only referring to that weirdly abstract (and from a certain point of view, utterly useless) linguist's knowledge of a language. This kind of familiarity doesn't mean that you can actually speak the language; all it means is that you can describe, and perhaps appreciate it. In some ways, it's rather hollow.
All self-pity aside, though, you might expect that Kazakh and its sister languages would have some wonderfully peculiar features ... and yeah, they do. One of my favourites is something known as 'vowel harmony' – a system whereby vowels organise into groups, then hang out exclusively with fellow group members while generally shunning the company of other vowels. In practical terms, this might mean that you can never have an /a/ and a /u:/ in the same word, because they belong to separate groups.
Why would a language do this? Well, the members of each group are usually similar in some way, like all being produced in one part of the mouth, or all requiring a rounding of the lips. Herding them together therefore means that the sounds in a single word 'harmonise' with each other like notes in a musical chord. Some may argue that harmony achieved through separation is basically phonetic apartheid, but fans of vowel harmony (which also occurs in a couple of European tongues, Finnish being the most well-known) write about it in positively inspired and poetic terms.
Worrying analogies or not, if vowel harmony can produce words like "балалар" (balalar), then I'm for it. This is my favourite Kazakh word, as several of you have heard me say in the past. It means "children", and it's just perfect for the job. Let me demonstrate:
"So what did you get up to on Sunday?"
"Oh, nothing much. The wife went to visit her mum in hospital, so my job was to stay at home with three noisy kids and try to keep their balalar under control".
Great, isn't it? I think we should import it into English.
Kazakh also makes distinctions between aspirated and unaspirated consonants. To understand this, try making a /t/ sound a few times, and notice where your tongue goes. It starts out in contact with a ridge of bone just above your front teeth, and when you release it, a little puff of air escapes your lips. The puff of air is the 'aspiration'. If you try, though, you'll find it's possible to perform all the other moves involved in producing a /t/ without letting any air out. This is unaspirated /t/, considered to be a completely distinct sound in quite a few languages.
The effect of this really depends on your personal taste. For example, "no" in Kazakh is жоқ (zhok), but with an unaspirated қ which makes the word stop suddenly, as though you've slammed on the brakes mid-speech. It either sounds crisp and cheery or abrupt and impolite, depending on who's speaking and on how much affinity you feel towards the sound of Kazakh in general. Personally, I rather like it.
Because of this and various other features, Cyrillic script has to be adapted somewhat to fit the Kazakh sound inventory. Some standard Russian characters aren't used (or are reserved for foreign loan words, just as English-speakers only use the é in café for imported words), some are adapted to represent Kazakh (rather than Russian) sounds, and an extra nine characters have been added.
To my eyes, these extras make Kazakh writing seem pleasantly 'fancy'. When I see it, I often feel like I'm reading something a bit special, like a friendly greeting card or a decorative sign. Here are two Kazkakh phrases, "Magan diriger kerek" (I need a doctor) and "Bul qansa turadi" (How much is it?). See what you think:
Маған дәрігер керек
Бұл қанша тұрады
I think it's mostly the ұ that does it, though I also like the tail on the қ.
Ok ... I'm about to finish up this entry, having covered just a tiny fraction of all the languages written in Cyrillic. The subject, as you can see, is pretty huge. And I guess by now you've all concluded that I'm either
a) really quite obsessed by this whole Cyrillic thing,
b) just a complete nut, or
c) both.
Whichever option you chose, you're probably right.
I hope that I've communicated here some of the joy I experience when familiarising myself with another writing system, and also shown that doing so can occasionally provide little windows onto parts of the world that we don't know so much about. Failing that, I hope you at least enjoyed the 'drunken Tsar chronicles'. There are plenty more out there if you're interested.
I'll conclude this series of rambles with one more entry, probably some time next month. In the meatime ...
C НОВЫМ ГОДОМ!!
(s novym godom = happy new year!!)
* I didn't actually know much about Peter before I wrote this. Got some of my info from About.com, some from the 'In Your Pocket' guide to St Petersburg (named after guess-who), and the rest was just bits and pieces gleaned from reading around on the net and talking to a few people.
** Actually this is a bit misleading, because Russian is a 'stress language' like English, and an unstressed "o" has a different sound. But still, knowing the sound of a stressed "o" at least gets you on the path.
*** Orthographers are people who study writing systems and, if they're very lucky, occasionally have a chance to invent them.
**** Actually the linguist who devised the Roman script was half-Russian, half-Georgian ... but why let the truth spoil a cheesy joke, eh?
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