L 0 K 1 on Nostr: Solzhenitsyn. (I had to check that, it's terrible phoneticisation). I know several ...

Solzhenitsyn. (I had to check that, it's terrible phoneticisation). I know several slavic languages to a usable degree and I know all the mess between them. It's been quite funny landing in portuguese territory because they use so many phonetics in common with the serbs, most especially.

The latinisation of foreign languages into english is a total shitstorm of bullshit. The amount of times B/V, P/B, C/Ts, and so many other things get muddled is incredible. Like, how in the FUCK did "Beijing" get mangled into "Peking" exactly? Wade-Giles don't voice their Ps? And unvoice their DJs (to kh)???

It's my opinion that if you were to point at one european language and settle on using its phonetics to express the phonemes of other languages, Russian is the most universal. Some of the characters have to be swapped around from what you expect but basically, there is more european phonemes in russian script than any single other european language.

It made me very sad that the western yugoslavians, in particular, have been abandoning cyrillic.

If I was designing a single alphabet for europe, to cover all of the nuances, it would be russian with the double consonant letters of serbian, the ones for Dj and the short "ty" sound that westerners usually misread as "ch".

Out of all of europe, the Bulgarians are the closest to accurately phoneticising foreign languages, except for their funny habits of germanising a few things like W. Visky, Vinni puh... this is also a russian habit.

I have this overwhelming feeling like somewhere along the way, a whole culture learned to speak by misreading the phonetics of another culture. B/V are a great example. Now I am exposed constantly to portuguese, I see so many times words that make more sense with B where they write the V. Moebel, the german word for furniture, is Moveis. Everywhere the portuguese put 'eis' it's "el" or "al" eg Animais. Even their word for "more" is "mais" which if you follow that substitution gives you "mal" which is the german word for "more" as in multiply.

It's no wonder once you learn enough basic level in about 5 different european languages you can understand all of them. I don't struggle very hard to understand anything anymore, whether it's italian, spanish, portuguese, russian, bulgarian, yugoslavian, german.. I have had little exposure to the nordics but I know their stuff overlaps a lot with english, german and russian a lot too.