I’ve been sleeping my way through this morning. Tired and confused, I just woke up on a domestic flight half-way between Moscow and Murmansk.
(Eating oyster till 2am isn’t wise when you have get up at 5 to catch an early plane, but who can resist when it’s ready and served?)
I grabbed the Aeroflot magazine from the seat pocket in front of me, just scanning through it, looking at the pictures. I don’t understand Russian, unfortunately. Long time ago I wanted to learn it, to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in Russian. I gave it up. It’s too damn hard.
I got as far as to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. That’s easy, and it’s convenient to be able to read signs with street names and stuff like that. There are all these s-like letters (pronounced sh- and ch- and tch- and ts- and so on) that I never get control on. Bit except from that, the Cyrillic alphabet is basically a mix of the Latin and the Greek (I know the Greek letters because they are frequently used as mathematical symbols, pi and phi and delta and so on).
The English dictionaries (Webster and Oxford unabridged) are big, no doubt, but the Russian dictionaries are even bigger. Rich languages, with lots of synonyms and many words of slightly different meanings, give big dictionaries. The Nordic languages are simple in comparison; few words and easy grammar (some local dialects are exceptions).
The number of letters in each word is another issue. Right in front of me I have this sign which says, in Russian and in English:
“Fasten seat belt while seated”
“Life vest under your seat”
I suppose it’s the same meaning, in both languages. Counting the total number of letters, I find:
English version: 25+21=46 letters
Russian version: 43+44=87 letters
No wonder the Russian dictionaries become big
(In the picture above you can check my figures. I took it using myu cell phone, in flight mode of course. Sorry about the poor picture quality.)
