13 March 2016. From the Russian Web… DIG RIGHT IN!

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Pitfalls await the unwary translator at every turn… literally, “Щи и каша, пища наша” (“Shchi i kasha, pishcha nasha”) is “Shchi and kasha, that’s our food”. That not only doesn’t rhyme, it has none of the “flavour” and “savour” of the Russian original. I’d say that its idiomatic English equivalent is, “Kasha and shchi, that’s for me!” That not only rhymes, it restores some of the original’s “taste”…

Be careful… “false friends” and false cognates abound… so, do have a care for the MEANING and the FLAVOUR of the language…

BMD

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20 December 2015. On The Language of Holy Rus

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For more on G Yu Gerovsky, click here. I do daresay that the “Ukrainian” POV isn’t the only one about…

BMD

24 May 2015. Feastday of Ss Kirill and Mefody. Day of Slavic Writing and Culture

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21 February 2015. A Map Well-Worth Pondering

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Linguistic Map of the post-Soviet successor-state Ukraine based on 2009 information from the Kiev National Linguistic University and 2001 Ukrainian census data. Note, one only finds concentrations of “Ukrainian” (Galician-Polish dialectical pidgin) speakers only in the yellow areas. The Russian-Ukrainian creole Surzhik is in orange, Russian is in red, and Rusin (spoken in Podkarpatskaya) is in red-violet. The map also highlights the Bulgarian, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Crimean Tatar, and Belarusian minorities. In short… there’s NO “Ukrainian” nationality. After all, the main distinguishing point of a “people” is a distinct and specific language. Today is International Mother Language Day… the “Ukraine” doesn’t have a “mother language”… therefore, it doesn’t go bump in the night, and never did.

BMD