- Where is a site that gives Russian words in whatever you call the regular alphabet instead of Cyrillic–like a dictionary where I look up theRussian word for, say, GARDENER, and get the answer SPLOTNIK or whatever it is but in the regular alphabet abcdefgh, etc.
2) But the bigger question is, I was reading in a book about Gogol that it was he who created the Russian language for literature, and yet I also have read that for literature the Russians used Old Church Slavonic in common with all the other Slavic languages. What does it all mean?
If Gogol created a new kind of Russian then how could people read it? And his books were praised even in their own time, so everybody must have understood.
signed: B. Wildered
Dima Chirkin’s site here is pretty good: click Languages / Russian dictionary, and check the ‘transliterate output’ box.
The Gogol bit sounds like literary hype; it just means that he was a highly influential prose stylist.
What raygirvan said. Also, Old Church Slavonic was a literary language (and a litrugical language, a use which has persisted to this day), but its literary use faded out centuries ago. Gogol is much more recent; by that point, Russian literature was generally written in the vernacular.
the vernacular
(which by Gogol’s time was modern Russian - a basis of old Slavic roots with a strong overlay of imported French).
I looked around online for this for a little while and could not find a site like that. Maybe Eva Luna or another Russian-speaking Doper can help.
However, I’d recommend you to go ahead and take a crack at learning the Cyrillic alphabet. I’m betting you’ll find it easier than you thought to get used to recognizing the letters. Here’s a good place to get started.
bordelond, there’s a link in my earlier reply.
Yeah, if you enjoy monkeying around with languages, try learning Cyrillic. Some of the letters are very similar to the analogous Greek letters, so you’ll recognize some from high school math, and some are just like the English letters. There are only 30-some Cyrillic letters, total (some other languages written in Cyrillic, like Serbian or Uzbek or Ukrainian, have a spare letter or two, and there are a couple of letters that were eliminated from Russian right after the Revolution), so really, it’s not that bad. It’s not like learning to write Chinese or something.
I bet you could find a used paperback Russian dictionary for a buck or so, and it should have an alphabet/pronunciation key in the front. Have fun, and come back and post your Slavic linguistics questions!
:o
My fault for not waiting for the page to fully download. It took a while, so I thought the link was bad or something.
[testing out site]
Wow! That’s sweet!
[/testing out site]