Never heard of him..

Incidentally, has anyone else had to read "The death of Ivan Illych"?

happy birthday, dedushka Lenin!

i was so upset when i wasn't accepted into pioneers at the Lenin museum like the very best of us

btw, does anyone still have pionerskiy galstuk?

btw, does anyone still have pionerskiy galstuk?

"Communism is a limited creed, and its limitations are inevitable. If the original impulse is envy, malice, and hatred against someone who has something you have not got, you are inevitably limited by the whole impulse to which you owe the origin of your faith and movement. That initial emotion may be well founded, may be based on justice, on indignation against the vile treatment of the workers in the early days of the industrial revolution. But if you hold that creed, you carry within yourself your own prison walls, because any escape from that origin seems to lead towards the hated shape of the man who once had something you had not got; anything above or beyond yourself is bad. In reality, he may be far from being a higher form; he may be a most decadent product of an easy living which he was incapable of using even for self-development, an ignoble example of missed opportunity. But if the first impulse be envy and hatred of him, you are inhibited from any movement beyond yourself for fear of becoming like him, the man who had something which you had not got.
'Thus your ideal becomes not something beyond yourself, still less beyond anything which now exists, but rather, the petrified, fossilised shape of that section of the community which was most oppressed, suffering and limited by every material circumstance in the middle of the nineteenth century. The real urge is then to drag everything down toward the lowest level of life, rather than the attempt to raise everything towards the highest level of life which has yet been attained, and finally to move beyond even that. In all things this system of values seeks what is low instead of what is high."

I dunno what happened to mine...good question!

They couldn't even come up with a Russian word for a 'Halstuch'!?

waht language is that?
btw, just as yiddish couldn't come up with its own words for "dach", "kachka", etc.

There is life beyond Russian and Yiddish, you know...

'btw'? What 'btw'? There is life beyond Russian and Yiddish, you know...

It's German, 'btw', and the Yiddish I speak does not have to resort to Slavicisms.

They couldn't even come up with a Russian word for a 'Halstuch' or neckerchief!?

It's German, 'btw', and the Yiddish I speak does not have to resort to Slavicisms.

Just out of curiosity, how is your Yidish different from "regular" German?

btw, just as yiddish couldn't come up with its own words for "dach", "kachka", etc.

and the Yiddish I speak does not have to resort to Slavicisms.

While speaking of neckties, "yiddish" word for a necktie is kravat. Now, where's that coming from?

mat` has asked a good question.

While speaking of neckties, "yiddish" word for a necktie is kravat. Now, where's that coming from?

From the German 'Kravatte', via the French 'cravat', a corrupt pronunciation of the word 'Croat' and not the Croat word for the item.

From the German 'Kravatte', via the French 'cravat', a corrupt pronunciation of the word 'Croat' and not the Croat word for the item.
Has he? Or has he only shown his ignorance about the language?

OT: does anyone else from the old country remember the times when it was rumored that one can be stopped on a street (right before or after ukrainian independence) and asked what "galstuk", "fortochka" and something else are in ukrainian?

Parasol'ka ;-)

no kidding. how do you know that it's the ukrainians who borrowed it from germans and not vice versa?

With this example, one would look for when a word first appears in Ukrainian vs. German.

how old is german?

The history of the language begins with the High German consonant shift during the Migration period, separating South Germanic dialects from common West Germanic. The earliest testimonies of Old High German are from scattered Elder Futhark inscriptions, especially in Alemannic, from the 6th century, the earliest glosses (Abrogans) date to the 8th and the oldest coherent texts (the Hildebrandslied, the Muspilli and the Merseburg Incantations) to the 9th century.

One of the key difficulties tracing the origin of the Ukrainian language is due to the fact that firm evidence for the existence of Ukrainian language in its modern form only goes as far as 17th century. The language itself must have formed earlier, but there are differing opinions as to the exact circumstances and timeframe of its creation.

no kidding. how do you know that it's the ukrainians who borrowed it from germans and not vice versa?

how do you find that out?
how old is german?

OT: does anyone else from the old country remember the times when it was rumored that one can be stopped on a street (right before or after ukrainian independence) and asked what "galstuk", "fortochka" and something else are in ukrainian?