J. B. S. Haldane said that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”; further proof, if needed, is provided by Katie Davies at the Calvert Journal:
Bulgarian scientists have erected a new national monument to the Cyrillic alphabet on a remote island in Antarctica.
The joint Bulgarian-Mongolian project on Livingston Island — close to Bulgaria’s Antarctic base — was unveiled to mark Bulgaria’s Independence Day on 3 March.
Standing at 2.5 metres tall, the sculpture comprises four stacked blocks, each side decorated with Cyrillic lettering. Sealed boxes of soil from the Bulgarian cities of Varna, Pliska, Preslav, Veliko Tarnovo, Sofia were also left at the base of the sculpture, which is attached to the ground using two steel bolts.
The monument will stand alongside Antarctica’s first Orthodox church, the St Ivan Rilski chapel, which was erected close to the base in 2001. The outpost also has its own museum of early scientific instruments, and was named an official branch of the National Museum of History in Sofia in October 2012.
More information is available at this Transitions Online post. Thanks, Bathrobe!
Does this rival Antarctic research station have its own writing-system monument? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Sejong_Station
Bulgarians are a bit crazy about Cyrillic. It’s more like if Americans put up the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in some prominent place regardless of whether it made sense in that place objectively speaking. Installing your country’s flag wherever possible or erecting monuments to some prominent politicians seems to be in the range of normal. What other countries might have done in the same vein? The only thing that springs immediately to mind is Italians foisting a recording of Va pensiero.
In honor of its Founding Documents, US research stations should feature a giant bronze ſ.
@ D.O. Not “a little crazy”, simply proud of their historic role in the literary and religious development of the Cyrillic alphabet as standard format of Old Church Slavonic prior to being adopted by Russian Orthodoxy.
Well, I suppose I’m unlikely to ever visit it. I have, however, been to Armenian Alphabet Monument: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/armenian-alphabet-monument
What’s even stranger about the Antarctic monument is that it’s a joint Bulgarian-Mongolian project.
The covering of snow on the Armenian alphabet looks kind of ironic, as though it’s been buried by the ages.
Mongolia appointed an Antarctic researcher, Dr. Dugerjav, to the post of ambassador in Bulgaria. He worked as a researcher on Bulgarian Antarctic station before becoming an ambassador.
And so joint colonization of the Antarctic became an unlikely focus of Bulgarian-Mongolian relations…
I’ve been to the monument to the Komi letter Ö many times…
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Памятник_букве_ӧ
See also: the monument to ё.
The monument to Belarussian letter “Ў” in Polotsk
https://vetliva.com/tourism/what-to-see/pamyatnik-bukve-v-polotske/
I’ve also been to the Armenian Alphabet Monument and the Georgian Alphabetic Tower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetic_Tower
(I didn’t go up it though. It was brand new when I was there. I don’t think you could enter it at that time.)
Hristo, I didn’the mean it in a derisive way. Sorry for any offence.
Do they actually use ё for writing Russian? I had the idea that it was just for books for children and foreigners.
I feel like this comment thread is (leaving out the Antarctic stop for now …) generating a proposed itinerary for an extremely-specialized-interest tour of formerly Soviet territories. I’d put it on my bucket list!
Yes. It’s use is optional for most words, but mandatory for words where replacing ё with е can cause confusion – eg, падеж/падёж
I once heard the quip that Russian is the most modest of languages, because it puts я at the end of its alphabet. Does anyone have an idea of where that originates?
This is not what they meant, of course, but monument to letter ё brings up immediately ё-моё (Two dots on the second ё are optional)
Goddammit, what happened to my little Russian joke ?? Is this the “eat my Cyrillic!” I’ve heard about here ?
Must be. (*issues ritual apologies*) Can you present it in Latin transcription? Or e-mail it to me, and I’ll post it for you.
Stu Clayton says (via e-mail):
yo, bro !
ё, брё !
@Y: There is a famous poem for children about why я is at the end of the alphabet, written by Boris Zakhoder. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, it was published in 1955 but written a couple of years earlier.
In Istria, there’s Glagolitic Alley. It’s not taken care of all that well, which isn’t really all that surprising in Croatia, but it’s a bit disappointing in Istria, where things usually function at least a bit better.
Glagolitic Alley (Croatian: Aleja glagoljaša) is a memorial composed of a string of eleven outdoor monuments dotting the road between the villages Roč and Hum in Croatia.
Roč and Hum sound like 19th-century Indo-Europeanists.
There’s also The Baška Glagolitic Path on Krk. It looks like it’s still in decent shape (but it’s also still new, we’ll see in 30 years or so), and apparently consists of 4 large monuments to the letters by sculptor Ljubo de Karina, and 30 small ones by students from various European academies. Each letter was sponsored by a city or business with a name starting in it, and Zadar got Z, so Zagreb went for A for Agram.
I love Istrian place names, in both Croatian and Italian.
The letter “O”—or at least someone who claims to be that letter of the divine alphabet—is a non-player character in the game Planescape: Torment. He’s kind of stuck up, but I don’t know if that’s typical of letters, or just him.
China has an entire museum devoted to its writing system — the National Museum of Chinese Writing. I’ve been there. It’s almost entirely concerned with the history of Chinese writing, which is not strange considering that it is located in Anyang, the city where the ruins of Yin (of oracle bone fame) were unearthed.
There is a token section devoted to the scripts of ethnic minorities, with a small case devoted to each script, but make no mistake, this museum is a paean to the glories of Chinese writing.
The impressive Japan Kanji Museum right on Shijo in Gion near Yasaka Shrine opened in June 2016 in what was once an old school building.
https://www.japanvisitor.com/japan-museums/kanji
The National Hangeul Museum opened in Seoul in 2014, on Hangul Day, 9 October (the museum itself uses the spelling Hangeul according to the official romanization system in South Korea). It has the expected sections on the creation of Hangul and an introduction to the alphabet as well as an interesting collection of manuscripts, but for me its real value lies in its excellent showcase of Hangul typography throughout its exhibits.
I saw the St. Petersburg-based band Otava Yo on their tour of the UK a couple of years ago. They play updated, humorous versions of folk songs. http://otava-yo.spb.ru/ru/ Great fun, even for people like me who don’t know Russian. Their official merch includes shirts with a letter ё on them. I recommend checking out their videos on YouTube.
George Grady : “The letter “O”—or at least someone who claims to be that letter of the divine alphabet—is a non-player character in the game Planescape: Torment. He’s kind of stuck up, but I don’t know if that’s typical of letters, or just him.”
I just started playing the game and he’s not in the pub now — is he only present in certain times of the day in the pub (The Smoldering Corpse)? I just recruited Dak’kon who according to the wiki is right next to him?
EDIT: Always wanted to play that game, and it was on sale on Good Old Games for Christmas an New Year’s. If anyone has played it, does he disappear if you fulfill the +1 wisdom quest or did I fuck up the dialogue tree? Can’t remember.
Instead, Americans have someone sing the national anthem before every ball game – not just the ones where the national team plays against another country’s national team.
@David M.: Hey, if one of our random local teams plays a random visiting team from Canada (reasonably common in ice hockey; happens occasionally in baseball) we’ll throw in their anthem too.
Happens in Canada, too – we watched a Canucks game in December, and they had someone sing both “Star Spangled” and “Oh Canada” because they played against a team from Florida (and the crowd stood and sang along for “Oh Canada”). But I don’t know whether they only sing the Canadian anthem when they play a U.S. team or at purely Canadian games as well.
As DM said, they don’t do that at European soccer games, even if teams from different countries meet – only for the national teams.
Y : “I once heard the quip that Russian is the most modest of languages, because it puts я at the end of its alphabet. Does anyone have an idea of where that originates?”
That’s amusing, because “A” — “аз” — as in “азбука (aphabet)” — formed from the names of the first two letters in the Cyrillic alphabet — comes from азъ (I — first person singular pronoun). Maybe it’s a joke about that?
There is a classic fairy tale in verse by the wonderful Boris Zahoder which may be the source of the joke.
Всем известно:
Буква Я в азбуке
Последняя.
А известно ли кому,
Отчего и почему?
There, shameless letter Я insists that it’s not just a mere letter but a whole Pronoun and therefore must take the first place. But it discovers that can’t form any words by itself, without other letters’ cooperation. Thus humiliated, the selfish letter begs to be admitted into the ranks, even if it mean standing dead last.
А(з) begins alphabet and Я ends it making the whole thing sort of circular. Might be some deep mysterious waters.
Might be some deep mysterious waters.
You bet. The Kazakh writer Olzhas Süleymenov once wrote an entire book called Az i Ja, deriving all kind of
deep insightsmystical woo from the fact that Russian Azija “Asia” can be read as “I and I”, containing gems like Sibir’ “Siberia” and “Sumer” being both the same word, going back to su “water” and yer “land, earth”.Playing the national anthem before a sporting event can (in rare cases) be an effective deterrent to trespassers. I was an undergraduate at St. John’s College (Annapolis) in 1971-75. One year, someone thought it would be amusing and appropriate to play the Star Spangled Banner before the intramural softball championship game, and brought a portable record player, an LP (a John Philip Sousa collection, I think), and several hundred feet of extension cord.
Due to an unanticipated coincidence of scheduling, when the tune started playing, a home football game at the Naval Academy had just ended. Though across the street from each other, the two schools had nothing to do with each other except annual croquet and chess challenges. However, SJC is in between the USNA campus and USNA football stadium. When the music started, hundreds of midshipmen and their dates were cutting across SJC’s back campus near (but not on) the softball field. As soon as they heard the first notes, they all stopped and stood at attention. So the softballers put it on repeat and made them all alternate between standing at attention and moving as far and as fast as they could between plays. Or at least that was what the softball players told me – I wasn’t there. I’m told the midshipmen took the long way home from their next home football game.
@Michael Hendry: For my sins I have comparatively recently ended up on the SJC fundraising mailing list. Which means I just received a notification of the date and logistical arrangements for this year’s croquet confrontation with the USNA. (There are “sponsorship” opportunities available for the match, at various price points ranging from $1K up to $15K, mostly tax-deductible.)
The croquet matches began while I was there. As I recall, they challenged the USNA, who had to go out and buy a croquet set and learn the rules, since it was not one of their 58 (I think it was) established sports, but they had a policy of never turning down a challenge.
Are you an alumnus? Or just a plausible mark?
@MH: I am not an alumnus although I am among the perhaps larger group of folks who at age 17 was quite intrigued by the place and toyed with the idea seriously* before instead matriculating at a more “conventional” university (albeit one that did instruct me in Ancient Greek). I made a modest donation a few years back when they hired as president (of the Annapolis campus) someone I had known once upon a time because we had worked together for a year in the early Nineties at the very beginning of our “grown-up” professional careers, and that was enough to get me pegged as a mark. There should be a box you can check to communicate “this may be a one-off donation, so please don’t spend so much money sending me follow-up solicitations that the net value of this donation to you drops below zero.”
*I went as far as paying a visit to Annapolis to check it out in person, although what I remember most vividly about that trip, which was sometime in ’82, is crossing the Chesapeake on the Bay Bridge in the middle of a very heavy rainstorm with extremely gusty sidewinds trying to blow the car I was driving (my mother’s fortunately well-ballasted ’79 Chevy Caprice) off the bridge into the bay.
“this may be a one-off donation, so please don’t spend so much money sending me follow-up solicitations that the net value of this donation to you drops below zero.”
If the solicitations are via automatically generated e-mails, it’s probably more costly for them to strike you from the distribution list (because some paid operator needs to do that) than to keep sending them until the entropic death of the universe.
@Hans: fair point but they do also send me glossy printed hard-copy stuff in the mail where there is genuine marginal cost involved for printing, handling, and postage each time they do so.
If you contacted them and asked them to take you off their mailing list, they would probably do so.
I’m not sufficiently aggravated, because they do tell me about interesting things like croquet matches (and one-week summer seminars in New Mexico on interesting material that might be worth checking out if I had no other current demands on my time etc.).
I’ve successfully unsubscribed from a lot of such lists* by just clicking on “click here to unsubscribe”. That’s usually in very small font somewhere near the bottom, but it’s there.
* Having signed a few petitions, I get donation spam from the entire US Democratic party apparatus and every Democratic candidate for federal or state office unless I unsubscribe.