Alien Tongues

Posting on AT is light at the moment because the Away Team will be giving several presentations at InConJunction in Indianapolis next weekend, meaning I’m making slides and media clips instead of posting.

However, we did want to bring you this from our correspondents in Bulgaria, where volunteer artists – some might say “vandals” – updated this Soviet-era monument:

The label at the bottom is cut off in a lot of photos – it says в крак с времето, translated by most reporters as “Moving with the times.”

Bulgarian is a Slavic language, meaning it’s related to Russian and Polish, but not all that closely – the three languages come from different branches of the Slavic family, and Bulgarian is more closely related to Serbian and Croatian.

Nowadays Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic, which is also used to write Russian (Russian uses a couple of additional vowel letters), and which is chock full of letters that look kinda-sorta like the Roman alphabet but have different sounds. If you don’t read Cyrillic, you may have scratched your head over the СССР on Russian spacecraft (though once you know that the С is pronounced like our “s” and the Р like our “r”, you can map СССР roughly onto “Soviet Socialist Republics” without having to know the exact Russian.) If you do read Cyrillic, you get a headache every time some comics letterer uses я for American “r”, because я is pronounced “ya”, and it’s hard to re-train yourself on just a few lines of dialogue.

С and р are almost all we need to sound out (badly) the vandal’s message. The other one that throws English speakers is в, pronounced “v”. V krak s vremeto (the consonants are prepositions, and no, there are no vowels in the words; just run them onto the next word) – that’s still just an approximation of the sounds, of course. But our lesson on Bulgarian pronunciation will have to wait until after our ICJ lesson on Klingon pronunciation, coming next weekend.