Moscow hurts your ears!
I was in Moscow last week and fascinated by their writing. For a crash course in reading cyrillic, read on.
My earlobes have just got warm again after getting back from Moscow last week. It was minus 8 degrees and my silver earrings froze with very uncomfortable consequences. (I am sure any physicists out there will tell me they didn’t actually freeze, but it felt like having my ears clamped between two ice cubes.) It is a lovely city, so I do recommend going there but either a little later in the year or wearing non-conductive earrings.
I was spending a few days training young Russian lawyers to write persuasively in English. You have to admire them – we Brits find it hard to write coherently in English and they have to convert to our alphabet first. Once you know the cyrillic alphabet, you can work out what a lot of the signs say, which is fun if you like words as much as I do. So here is a little taster just in case you decide to go there one day.
If you are hungry you need to look for the word P E C T O P A H because P is pronounced like our R and so on to convert the word into R E S T O R A N. Most words can’t be written on a conventional keyboard though because they contain letters we don’t use at all.
Here are a few words with their phonetic equivalent in more familiar letters
And here is a traffic jam, Moscow style, with one of the words you have just decoded as a bonus.
And here is the world's most recognised PECTOPAH as it appears on Moscow's streets.
Comments
Great to see Grammar to Go spreading the good words further than England!
Considering the challenge that those Russian lawyers must face using our language persuavsively when, as you so, we struggle… well good job they had you teaching them!
Keep up the good work.
By Nigel Morgan - Morgan PR on 2010 03 24
Thank you for your kind words Nigel! Let me know when you are thinking of going to Russia and I’ll give you the “learn the Russian alphabet in two hours” tips that I found so valuable.
By GTG on 2010 03 24