Re: Announcing my new Sci-fi Book

Lawrence Watt-Evans <lwe@xxxxxxx> wrote in
news:gb7t25hhru84bf2d7eh8mslr5nv4kg9m4a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

On Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:13:14 -0700, Gutless Umbrella Carrying
Sissy <taustinca@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

When my father was working in Saudi Arabia for Aramaco (~1960 or
so), he would fire up his ham radio and listen to the Russian
(or, rather, Soviet) hams argue politics. In English. Because it
was the one language they had in common, and apparently, they
really did have to learn it in school.

For certain values of "learn."

I suspect the ham operators in question were not entirely
representative, but he had no way to tell.

I've dealt with several products
of the Soviet educational system, and while many spoke/wrote
good English (much better than my Russian), I got a couple of
fan letters way back when that I could only make any sense of by
translating them word-by-word (NOT sentence by sentence) into
Russian.

Even then, I had to guess at a lot of words, as the spelling was
atrocious -- the letter H appeared randomly throughout, rarely
in words it should be in; words that were supposed to have an
audible H would usually have a G or (this I don't understand,
merely report) an F instead. W and various combinations (TH,
SH, CH, etc.) also gave them trouble.

Perhaps their spoken English was better?

We won't mention the articles. One writer seemed to think "the"
was properly used as an intensifier for adjectives.

There are not a few writers for whom English is their native
language who do that. They think it's *the* best way to emphasize
*the* point.

--
Terry Austin

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more ***."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.
.

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