Even as an 8 year old, that vodka soaked tobacco stained voice was hot.
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BTW this Saturday is the 100th anniversary of composer Leonard Bernstein’s birth.
(Lyrics by Steven Sondheim).
just sayin’
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I believe the double i is how the acute accent mark is denoted. IOW, “ii” transliterates и́ as opposed to И. In German, for comparison, o is transliterated as “o”, while ö is transliterated as “oe”.
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Why warn the lawyer? Just do it. I’m tired of the games. Who is paying her lawyer’s legal fees anyway?..the NRA, RT or Putin himself from some offshore bank account? Get real. We’ve been infiltrated. I’m sick of these fucking Russkies.
Like Rep. Swalwell said once, “Any tree you shake in this tRump forest, a Russian falls out.” Got that right.
Espionage used to be a big ass crime in this country. Can we get back to that being the case and treat it as such.
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I have a Russian Yoga teacher who spells her own name Lidiia. Just FYI.
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She spells it Maria. See eg
https://twitter.com/maria_butina?lang=en
In English, the letter i does double duty in a word like Maria (and many other words). It’s a vowel - “ee”. And it’s the consonant “y”, making the transition to the “a” vowel.
In Russian, the “i” doesn’t do that. Instead they have a single letter я that does double duty - but it puts the Y sound first and then follows up with the “a” vowel.
So both languages use one letter for two sounds - it’s just that they use different letters for the job.
And the name Maria is pronounced just like Мари́я.
Now, if Butina had decided to use the name “Mary” in English, even though that would be reasonable, I could see why the Government would choose to use “Maria.” But it’s ridiculous to use the spelling “Mariia,” which is not a good approximation of how it’s spelled in Russian - they don’t use two i’s - not a real name in English, and not how it’s pronounced - it’s not Mari-hiccup- i-a.
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Or even four – there’s a Cyrillic character щ that is rendered into English as “shch” – my old Russian teacher called it the “fresh cheese” sound. So the name of a certain Cold War-era Premier of the USSR gets ten letters in English (Khrushchev) for only six in Russian (Хрущёв).
It’s even worse if you use the German scheme of transliteration. Then he becomes “Nikita Sergejewitsch Chruschtschow”.
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Well then there’s Polish - consonants bunched up everywhere.
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Cheeto von Tweeto:
“WITCH HUNT. NO COLUSION!!! SHE HAS NEVER BEEN TO RUSSIA. Thirteen Democrats are at fault.”
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In some ways, Polish is worse. It starts out in Latin script, lulling foreigners into a false sense of security until they suddenly discover that they have no idea how to pronounce “Lech Wałęsa”…
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Is that the Russian Federalist Society N.A,?
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I understand there are “Rosenberg Solutions” to a problem like Maria.
(And to her many, many, many accomplices – both “foreign and domestic”.)
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The government is using a Library of Congress transliteration system that has a one-for-one mapping of Russian to Roman letters. In the system, the Russian letter я (‘ya’) is always transliterated as “ia” (not “ya”). Doesn’t matter what letter comes before or after or how it fits to equivalent words or names in English. This makes sense if you are doing machine transliteration, and if you have to alphabetize things or put millions of unfamiliar words (like place names) into a database. But it makes no sense for ordinary usage.
If the government were serious about using this system they would write that Mariia comes from Moskva in Rossiia. But they don’t. Only for her name.
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My last name is a Polish spelling of a Belarussian name (blame the 20th Century history of that part of the World). Being born and growing up in the US my name has never been pronounced “properly” ever.
The first time I flew to Warsaw in the mid 90s I rented a car. The woman behind the counter asked me my name. I said it and she instantly wrote it down and got every letter right.
I waited my whole life for that!
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Fine, but “ii” isn’t transliterating я. It’s transliterating и́. Look it up.
Just a suggestion: Consider reading comments before replying to them.
Ever tried to read Welsh? Sounds like a similar experience.
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I hereby commit my vote to you for the Internet Comment of the Year Award, and nominate you to the Interwebinarnet Hall of Famers
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"Despite this clear prohibition, the government has encountered multiple recent instances of you in the press commenting about the merits and evidence of this case,” the prosecutors wrote to attorney Robert Driscoll
I don’t understand how Driscoll is supposed to zealously represent his client if he isn’t allowed to inoculate potential jurors against evidence, or signal to Trump voters that they’re required to give political cover to GOP puppets who intervene on her behalf.
Back in my day, the Job Creators and Captains of Industry were given a free hand to order society as they saw fit. But now it’s like some people think the law should just be words on a page that we apply robotically to everyone no matter whose lap she’s been sitting on.
This country used to stand for something!
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Russian, American, whatever. Libertarians think it doesn’t matter who sits at the top of government if government is miniscule.
Nobody ever accused Libertarians of being especially careful thinkers, though, or of being overly attentive to details or history.
It’s like you’re trying to draw a full-color HDR photo of the Mona Lisa on a TI-86 graphing calculator. It just doesn’t have the resolution. Stick to Tetris or Snake.
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I was just going to make that comment. Ya beat me to it.