Famous Pairs: Week 5, #5

This one was submitted by a reader. It’s great. Difficult, but very clever.

Hint: uses punctuation instead of “and.”

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16 thoughts on “Famous Pairs: Week 5, #5

  1. From my observation, the double-y Zelenskyy spelling seems to be gaining the upper hand, so we may be headed for a consensus, which would be nice. I don’t think a final decision was ever made regarding Muammar/Moammar/Moamar
    el/al Gaddafi/Kaddafi/Qaddafi/Gadhafi/Khaddafi/Qadhdhafi/Godfrey/Gadfly.

  2. Yeah. You were fine. I was just crackin a joke. Not making a substantial point.

    Like, I feel sorta similar about “Kyiv”. I can understand someone when they say “Kiev”, or even, whatever. I’m not gonna disrupt a conversation just to “correct” them. You’ve taken pretty much that same tack in the past. We’re more alike than I like to admit. 🙂

    1. I keep making this same damn mistake. Starting to type into the comment form without remembering to click Reply first.

    2. Why’d they change it? I can’t say…people just liked it better that way.

      1. Three things are tangled up together: anglicization, Russian language & Ukrainian language. It’s a point of pride to the Ukrainian nationalists that they’re a separate culture with a separate language from Russian culture & language.

        Also, northern/Moscow Russians are racist, consider south Slavs inferiors.

        When anglophones say “The Ukraine”, that’s a Russian thing (and a Putin one). IOW, it’s a thing, not a real place. They’re barbars, not entitled to their own identity. Their language so-called, is a butchering of Russian.

        They just belong to Russia. Not distinct enough or competent to even run their own affairs. This treatment by itself is enough for the residents to form an identity & to think of the way they talk as distinct from Russian, which they also speak fluently.

        I mean “dialects” are also arguably “languages”—it just depends on context. Mandarin & Cantonese are mutually unintelligible but are bridged by a common writing system.

        Anyway, so they say they’re a country whose name is “Ukraine”, a proper name, not a noun like for some inanimate object. Since Ukraine’s breakaway, proponents of Ukrainian as its own language/identity have officialy made up their own transliteration from Ukrainian, also written in Cyrillic lettering just like Russian, into the Latin alphabet.

        “Kiev” approximates how Moscow Russians say the city name. “Kyiv” is the official transliteration from Ukrainian. The former is pronounced with two syllables, the latter has only one, sort of. It’s actually something like “key-eve”, the English words.

        If you wanna be “PC”, sure, go ahead & correct everyone who says/spells it wrong. I’m advocating against that, but y’know, who the hell am I to tell you what to do?

        1. Oh, about dialects. I wanted to mention code-switching.

          Boston natives code-switch between their Boston lingo & vocab, and their “outside” speech, namely TV American.

          Montreal natives code-switch between French & English. Their French is different enough that there are separate dubbings for Quebec & Parisian French. The speakers of each consider the other version unacceptable.

          So it is with bilingual Ukrainians. It’s only their Russian speakers who can’t code switch. Much like Canada’s English speaking population.

          1. Oh, and while many Brits can’t do a decent American accent, they know all the American lingo. While the reverse is not true. An American knows truck, but not lorry. Brits know both. Also, hood/bonnet, trunk/boot, elevator/lift…

        2. Thanks for explaining the Kyiv/Kiev spelling situation. A follow-up question: Why do some news outlets spell the president’s name “Zelensky” and others “Zelenskyy?”

          1. I have just started noticing the double-Y over the past few days. I’m guessing it also has something to do with the difference between Ukrainian and Russian, although I don’t see how it would change pronunciation.

          2. I don’t know the translit rules in detail but as with Kyiv, they’re mechanical so everything is there for a reason. Usually with translit, yes, there is a phonetic difference accounting for the doubled letter. For example, I do know Zelenskyy’s first name is Volodymyr & it doesn’t have any double-y’s. As for outlets in English making different choices, shrug, that’s to be expected. Whatever it means to the Ukrainian ear doesn’t make sense to a casual English reader. The only reason to conform is that default to English conventions is in effect Russophile. As is the case with the English tradition of writing it as Kiev.

            There’s a similar dispute with Lviv/Lwow. Only the 2nd language involved is, I believe, Polish. The city has a long history & had names in several languages.

            If you’ve heard Smetana’s beautiful The Moldau/Die Moldau, that’s the German name of the Czech river. In Czech, it’s a song of national pride, it’s their longest river, named Vltava & that’s what the piece is called. It’s one of a six-part work Ma Vlast = My Fatherland, basically Smetana’s pledge of allegiance.

          3. By the way, 9 of the 10 longest rivers in Europe flow thru Russia. The Dnieper goes thru Ukraine, Belarus & Russia. This is not just coincidence. These rivers are of great political significance to Russia’s history. And it’s one of the reasons a wannabe Novo Peter the Great would covet The Ukraine to be an integral chunk of a reconstituted Russian Empire.

        1. I don’t know any Vietnamese, but English-language newscasters always called her Madame “New.”

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