HOW RUSSIAN WAS INVENTED | 2006-03-21
Budarick indicates he speaks Russian and German.
German I can handle, but the rest of you are too young to remember how Russian was invented.
A thousand years ago some people got together to begin inventing the languages that would someday be Russian and Ukrainian. I kept up with it in the newspapers.
Their final press release said this:
"In the future there will be a group of smartasses called Americans who will need bringing down a peg."
"We are therefore going to put together a language that every American will look like an idiot trying to learn."
"It is going to be one solid mass of grammatical exceptions, tricky usages, and just plain dirty tricks on the poor bastard trying to learn it."
"So we will use the term 'Russki' but when they use it as the name of the language it will have to be PA-Russki, which could have no possible explanation except that we invented the whole language out of spite."
"But that will just be the FIRST nervous breakdown."
"When the smartass American staggers out of the rest home, we'll say, 'Look, maybe you can't learn the whole language, but you can look smart if you just know how to pronounce our alphabet.'"
"You think Americans won't fall for that, right out of the rest home?"
"My crystal ball tells me those Americans will fall for ANYTHING."
"So the poor dumb American will look at our alphabet and say, 'Well, this is more like it. Over of the letters here are the same as in English.'"
"Which will be true. But every single letter that looks like an English letter wil be pronounced DIFFERENTLY from the way they have been pronouncing it all their lives."
"When you have to change your brain patterns like that, it would be easier to learn written Chinese."
"But then again, Chinese wasn't invented specifically to cause heart failure."
No, Budarick, I'm too smart to try to learn Russian.
Two nervous breakdowns were enough.