Curse You, St. Cyril

When I wrote my "Pet Project" post, I wanted to include the authentic Cyrillic forms of the Russian words I was discussing. The only way I knew to do it at that point was to copy and paste from an online Russian-English dictionary. But this proved frustrating, because the dictionary often didn't get the word I was actually looking for. When I typed "to love" into the dictionary, I got the entry for the word "to", not the English verb I was looking for. When I shortened it to "love", I got the noun, not the verb. And on and on.

So I decided today to figure out how to set my keyboard so that I could have the ability to type in Cyrillic as well as in Latin characters. It took a little hunting, but I managed to do it. My computer is now bilingual in English and Russian, even if its owner isn't.

Unfortunately, I've discovered that few of the Cyrillic letters have the same key as their Latin equivalent. For instance, Д (equivalent to "D" in English) is made by striking the "l" key on a conventional keyboard. Б (equivalent to "B") is on the comma key. And on and on. Almost nothing maps to an equivalent-sounding letter in English. This will make typing even the simplest words in Russian a real chore, at least for a while.

Additionally, use of punctuation will require shifting from Cyrillic back into English, just to type a semicolon or what have you, then immediately shifting back to Cyrillic to go on my merry way typing in Russian. This is because Russian has more letters than English has--33 as opposed to 26--and thus requires more of the QWERTY keyboard to produce all of them.

I imagine this must be very inconvenient for Russophones who use a standard QWERTY keyboard. And in this age of Dell and Apple, Russians are no doubt doing their typing on computer keyboards designed for English speakers. Or, to be more specific, designed to slow down English-speaking typists who might otherwise type fast enough to jam up the keys of a kind of manual typewriter that has probably not been manufactured since before the Second World War.

In general, my Russian studies are not coming along so well as I had hoped. Partly this is because I do not devote enough hours to my Teach Yourself Russian course. But it is also because I now find myself mired in the Russian case system. Much like Latin, Ancient Greek and Classical Hebrew, Russian has a case system. And in fact, Russian's case system is more elaborate than the case systems of Latin or Ancient Greek; Russian has six cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and preopositional), compared to Latin's five and Greek's four.

On its own, this would not be so problematic, but when you mix in Russian's gender system, confusion can readily abound. Russian has three genders--masculine, feminine, and neuter. And sometimes a form that represents one case in one gender represents a completely different case in another.

For instance, in the nominative singular, the Russian word for "apartment" is квартура (kvartyoora), a feminine noun. The а-ending is the most common one for words of the feminine gender. But the а-ending is also used for the genitive of masculine-gender words that end in a consonant. So, the genitive of the common male name Борис (Boris) is Бориса (Boreesa). So simply seeing a word with an а-ending does not immediately tell you either its case or its gender.

If you encounter a word for the first time in the nominative, you can more often than not determine its gender (the one major exception being words that end with the Cyrillic character ь, a letter indicating a "soft sign" that has no sound of its own; words ending in ь in the nominative may be masculine or feminine). But if you encounter a word the first time in another case, you may have trouble determining its gender.

Add into this the erratic nature of Russian word order--as an inflected language, Russian can easily move around subjects, verbs, and objects in ways that an uninflected language like English cannot--and you have a prescription for massive confusion on the part of anyone not to the поместью (pomestyoo, or "manor") born. I suppose that, eventually, a Russian learner develops a sense of what all the possibility may be and can figure it all out from context. But for a foundation-level student such as myself, Russia's capricious case system causes the mind to reel.