THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

I enjoyed your take on Russian. It was a healthy American appraisal Bob!

Russian is one bug..r of a language! Only Helvetian is worse [native Schweizer Deutsch]

I am not an expert in languages nor on how they evolved, but i know that originally Cyrillic Russian was even worse then you have described. I have several of those old fonts on my computer. Unfortunately i can't share them here. They are quite beautiful [for the eyes] but not very useful unless ones primary occupation is sending encrypted messages.

Modern Russian is based on old church Slavonic [still used even now by the Hram Russiski Orthodox] which had/has even more characters. There are many variants too. And as DDD will tell you, there are differences in Belarus and Ukraine.

I think i am correct that this language was invented by PRIESTS [you prolly know some of their jolly saintly names] before most people could read and write in those regions. I think they mixed up Greek and Hebrew with Slavanic Runic. That was loooooong before the Communists.

Most of the people were peasants and could not read or write that stuff. Later German was quite popular among the learned and German became an influence on the scientifically inclined in Holy Russia before the fall of the Tzar.

Finally the Judaic Bolshovic Intelliganzia - some of whom were ENGLISH SPEAKING American Jews - "cleaned up" the Cyrillic alphabet and made it into the MODERN STANDARD FORM comprised of 33 characters [2 of which are not sounded]. This elite - new secular priest class - then enforced this new "improved" language over most of the peoples of Eurasia, Nort of the Himalya's and East of Germany. [the primary CCCP domain ].

Thus modern Russian came into being and is now the 5th or 4th major language on the planet.

I am sure the communist priest class had noted with great delight the attributes of Russian language which Bob has just written us about!

But they [and we] are all stuck with it now!

And when you Bob had to speak over the phone to someone at a Russian consulate then i know exactly what you had to endure.

That is not to say that Russian has no good qualities. It avoids "the" and "a" and the "is of identity" and has a good general to specific gramatical structure without the horrid convolutions of English [English encourages wordism and pseudo-intellectual essays which mean nothing but can buy you a PhD.

I still think German is the best and clearest language if one has profound things to say and wishes to say them honestly. It is an honest language and it is very consistant. It is hard to be a wordist in German without also immediately coming accross as a commedian!

German allows you to say anything because you may build compounds. And their rules of composition are intuitive.

Also you can express metaphysical ideas which are impossible in English [but this is not only due to the language - one has to consider that the language of a people is also an unspoken subconcious philosophy]. I am biassed of course because it is my mother tounge. But I am lazy and so it now takes me a long time to read Horst Mahler's stuff which Dr. F. Toeben posts on his website in German [too much work to translate]. But my German is still good enought to recognize that Horst Mahler is not a wordist. He understands the Jewish psyche well.

And BTW in German the personal pronoun is not capitalized, but when refering to others they are capitalized out of respect for them [ich, meine, compared to Sie, Du, Deine].

I have noticed that being native in German helps with Russian. That follows because German has had more influence on Russian than English. But nowedays they have so many transliterations of English words in the Russian vocabulary that you can transliterate English into Cyrillic and have your letters understood by most university educated young Russians.

The big problem with Russian [and my perswonal problem with it] is that even though they claim that Russian is spoken as it is written, in actual fact in common usage it IS NOT. Many characters are slurred over and the "o" is pronounced "a" when not stressed. For example Domodedovo [the new Airport not far from Lytkarino SE of Moskva] is pronounced Domadedava. Which when said rapidly over the usual PA system while you are anxiously waiting in an airport lounge is unintelligible to our ears.

It is particularly difficult for me because i have lost most of my hearing from my involvement in pyrotechnics.

[smiling] My Russian is limited to baby talk.

Djadja Pitay eate moi, eate balschoi mischka.

"Uncle Peter is mine, he is my Big Bear".

Da Lizinka.

OK

Best wishes.

Da svedanya

I went from two years of high school Latin to college Russian. I was in my mid-teens.

About fifteen years later, I took German at the college level.

After seven cases, a different alphabet and weird verbs, German was soooo

easy -- except for learning those forms of "to be" and those other parts

of speech that don't exist in Russian.

I think the non-joking answer is that the Rus, decendants of the slavic tribe, invented it before actual states were made in Eastern Europe. I think, but I'm not sure.