As our plane descended on Moscow’s Domododevo Airport, I found myself in this internal monologue, like the literary device we were taught called stream of consciousness.
I thought of the great Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy, who wrote the captivating short story ‘How much land does man require’ which is about a man who, in his lust for land, forfeits everything. I thought of Fyodor Dostoyevsky who gave us the timeless Crime and Punishment.
And yes, I also thought of Russia’s greatest serving to humanity – ?????. Sorry, I jumped the gun, but did you read my byline?
My sojourn here in ?????? for the 2018 ????? ??? has been worthwhile yet nightmarish.
When one visits a new country, one always wants to remember names of places visited so as to carry home those memories.
I doubt I will ever come home with such except of course the obvious stadia names as Luzhniki, Spartak, Mordovia and the like.
The visit to Russia has jolted yours truly from the Latin alphabet, or English if you like, and which consists of 26 letters.
The Russian alphabet is a different ball game. As I am penning this article here i ????????????? ?????? 32 (Krasnogorsky Boulevard), I am wondering how on earth a grown up can learn all these. I am yet to understand why Morocco, one of the African nations at this tournament translates to ???????.
For starters, Russian alphabet has 33 alphabets 10 of which are vowels, 21 consonants, and 2 signs (?, ?).
It is called the Cyrillic alphabet named after scholar and monk Cyril (827-869 AD), who together with his brother Methodius (826-885 AD) created this first Slavic writing system, according to various online sources.
Russian is an Eastern Slavonic language closely related to Ukrainian and Belorussian and is spoken by over 277 million people in Russia and 30 other countries.
An article by Keira Ives-Keeler for the British Council says, “The Cyrillic alphabet can intimidate non-native Russian speakers – but it shouldn't!”
In fact, there is an extra motivation Ives-Keeler notes that, “Speaking a language that many other native English speakers do not speak opens up opportunities that might not be available otherwise.”
My experience here may, also, just be your starting point to learn Russian. All you need is to be open to the fact their alphabet does not directly match with the English one.
For example, V as in Vote in English alphabet is B in Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet so that if we are to write Vote in Russian we begin with B. The B in English would be ? in Russian. G in English is written as ? in Russian and R is P in this Slavonic language. Gor Mahia would thus be ??? ?????. Z is written as ?. So, Zoo Kericho would be written as ??? ???????.
This is why I could not pick out my favourite ‘little water’ Vodka because my hosts have ‘disguised’ it as ?????. Now I, Toc??, is wiser.
