Tag Archives: Russian

Pronunciation tip: “Happy new year” in 27 languages

Posted on December 30, 2024 | Leave a comment

I’m overdue for a pronunciation tip video. Sorry – I’ve been busy doing things that earn money! (Also things that cost money. Travel in particular.) Here’s how to say “Happy new year!” in 27 languages: Afrikaans, Basque, Breton, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Welsh. And I give a bit of linguistic geekery here and there too.

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Why the y’s?

Posted on March 27, 2022 | 2 comments

My latest article for The Week is on the reason for the many y’s in transliterations of Ukrainian and Russian names, and how to read them:

A word to the Y’s on Ukrainian and Russian

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“ಠ ಠ what is that alphabet?” “ ツ easy!”

Posted on May 20, 2016 | Leave a comment

Another article for The Week! Actually, I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but it took a while getting posted because they were busy with the thing I wrote my other piece this week about, which shall not be mentioned here.

Anyway, this piece is the necessary sequel to the “How to identify languages” piece. That one focused on the Latin alphabet. This one looks at all the other alphabets. (Well, most of them. The Cree and Cherokee syllabic alphabets were cut to save length. And I skipped a few others that you really are unlikely to bump into.) It even has tips on telling apart languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet – and ones that use Arabic script!

How to identify Asian, African, and Middle Eastern alphabets at a glance

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Linguistic invasion?

Posted on July 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

My latest piece for TheWeek.com looks at “foreign” words that have come to be important in our political and military English, and how they got there:

Linguistic invasion! The foreign influence of English’s political and military words

My next article will be about annoying noises people – adults, even – make and should stop making. Do you have any favourites? Let me know today or tomorrow if you can!

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