Four Letters That Look Like “n.”

A Beijing day then.  I’m not leaving or returning from anywhere this Tuesday.  Just a meeting down in Maizidianr.  After that I can head back home.  Wang Jing is up and over to my right.  The Sony name is up there, atop what must be the company skyscraper.   Brands, like countries, used to demand different engagement.  I don’t mean to but I begin thinking about what it would be like to live there in Wang Jing.  Different, not better.

Languages too, wax and wane in global significance.  For a few decades after Liberation, every Chinese intellectual necessarily learned Russian.  The Lonely Planet series has a book on learning the language, which was one of many I secured, when I was back home last week.  Chinese is daunting, surely to people who can’t read Chinese.  It’s daunting to me, as I try, year after year, to move beyond the comprehension of a mere few hundred characters.  It is always suggested that the Chinese, by comparison have it easy when they set out to learn English:  There are only twenty-four letters in the alphabet rather than ten thousand ideographs to remember.   By this reasoning, Cyrillic shouldn't be too hard either.

I’m not so sure.  This is my first ten minutes invested in the prospect on learning Russian.  The “letters”, when we saw Soviet space craft drift by or Moscow Olympics posters, had always seemed like nonsense runes.  On page thirteen of my book, I do the count:  A bit more daunting than the Romance alphabet, there appear to be thirty-three letters in the Russian alphabet.  What is immediately clear is that the unlearning will be half the challenge.  There are at least four letters that look like “n.”  None of them make the “n” sound.  Assigning new meaning to fundamental pillars of cognition, like “n” won’t be easy.  Keep telling yourself there a re only thirty-three of them. (In fact, further reading confirms, St. Cyril only came up with thirty-one letters and two signs: hard and soft.  I can write this down, but I have no idea what it means, practically.)

The one Russian word I remember, besides, “no” and “thank you,” comes from a case study I once taught.  It seems to typify what I imagine all Russian words sound like.    “Relations,” the corner stone lubricant in the Chinese world: 关系 guanxi, is pronounced as “blat” in Russian.  I consider how much work remains before me before I could ever possibly un-hear “blat” as a colorful word, rather than as an unfortunate rhyme word for “flat” and “splat.” 

Tuesday, 03/06/18