Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

news.lettersofnote.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 122 posts

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#31

Post by bradrn »

rodary wrote: post #18
pacaro wrote: post #9

I love that he name checks and quotes Chkalov. Not that I expect anyone to know who Chkalov was, but there's a Chkalov Drive in Vancouver WA, and I went down the "how do I pronounce that, who is it named for" rabbit hole a few years ago, so his name always makes me smile. The Vantucky locals typically say Chuckalov or similar, and look blankly at anything close to ˈtɕkaləf

You don't need a t there (native Russian speaker), it's a clear ch like in check. This is a common mistake when transliterating the Russian ч (ch), t doesn't add anything. In fact, t makes it more difficult to pronounce it while it's an easy sound for most people to say.

What’s happening here is that /tɕ/ is a single sound — I’d transcribe it /t͡ɕ/, with a little tiebar to make that clear. This sound is an ‘affricate’, meaning that it’s pronounced by starting with a /t/ and releasing it with the tongue so that it finishes with a /ɕ/ sound. /ɕ/ alone would be the sound written in Russian as ⟨щ⟩, which is of course different. Incidentally English ⟨ch⟩ is also affricated, although it’s pronounced slightly differently, as /t͡ʃ/ rather than /t͡ɕ/.

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#32

Post by noduerme »

dmblit wrote: post #29
noduerme wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cursory reading of the history of Stalin's mass murders and deportations puts paid to this. No one living through the Terror mistook this bullshit for a Captain Kirk Iowa boy in space fantasy. And his usefulness isn't lost on the current FSB animals who wear Yuri pins inside their jackets.

The Terror has ended by October 1938, when Gagarin was 4 years old. I wouldn’t call that “living through”. I’m not saying there weren’t political prisoners or executions later. There were, but the scale is incomparable. We can safely say Gagarin met a lot of people who had won the war growing up, but he had not seen someone familiar taken to prison for no reason every other day, and I would assume had not heard much…

You don't see plainly from the language of the letter that he had internalized the terror his parents and society experienced? It's obsequious.

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#33

Post by noduerme »

FpUser wrote: post #25
noduerme wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the whole letter sounds like it was coded with a gun to his and his wife's head.

Nope. It does not

Real letters to wives don't include patriotic and political phrases about children being raised in a new paradise to come, except those written by cult members and those (in this case) written under duress.

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#34

Post by noduerme »

chx wrote: post #22
noduerme wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cursory reading of the history of Stalin's mass murders and deportations puts paid to this. No one living through the Terror mistook this bullshit for a Captain Kirk Iowa boy in space fantasy. And his usefulness isn't lost on the current FSB animals who wear Yuri pins inside their jackets.

He was but a small child then, being born in 1934 and they were very good at hiding the worst atrocities which was not exactly hard those years given the rather limited mass communication. No one was posting a Tiktok about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars.

Even with modern communications, most Russians publicly deny knowing that their government is committing atrocities against its own citizens. Of course, they know just as well as people knew throughout the Soviet era. Hence the degree of phoniness in a letter ostensibly to one's spouse that is only intended to satisfy the politburo. Could Gagarin possibly have been unaware of recent history or of what happened to heroes who failed?

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#35

Post by yareally »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #21

It’s amazing how you can sound so Russian in a letter. Are there any examples of letters from this long ago that clearly sound very American?

A little farther back, but the writings of Mark Twain come to mind.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221216033948/https://www.theat...

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#36

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

bee_rider wrote: post #16
noduerme wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cursory reading of the history of Stalin's mass murders and deportations puts paid to this. No one living through the Terror mistook this bullshit for a Captain Kirk Iowa boy in space fantasy. And his usefulness isn't lost on the current FSB animals who wear Yuri pins inside their jackets.

That is a good point. People can compartmentalize or be surprisingly shielded from some pretty horrifying things, though…

Almost makes you want to go vegan, doesn't it?

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#37

Post by dmblit »

noduerme wrote: post #32
dmblit wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Terror has ended by October 1938, when Gagarin was 4 years old. I wouldn’t call that “living through”. I’m not saying there weren’t political prisoners or executions later. There were, but the scale is incomparable. We can safely say Gagarin met a lot of people who had won the war growing up, but he had not seen someone familiar taken to prison for no reason every other day, and I would assume had not heard much…

You don't see plainly from the language of the letter that he had internalized the terror his parents and society experienced? It's obsequious.

I didn’t comment the letter, I commented your idea that he lived through the Terror and thus the letter. No, that wasn’t the case.

And once again: the terror the society experienced that was vivid to Gagarin was from the Germans and not from Stalin (although indeed it experienced both).

I don’t want to speak to the tone of the letter, you may interpret it as designed to do something and you may not. But to say that it is somehow influenced by the terror that happened before his time and not to someone in his family, the terror about which for all we know he knew nothing, and in society that had a major uniting experience since, is to put your thoughts in his head.

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#38

Post by kgeist »

pacaro wrote: post #9

I love that he name checks and quotes Chkalov. Not that I expect anyone to know who Chkalov was, but there's a Chkalov Drive in Vancouver WA, and I went down the "how do I pronounce that, who is it named for" rabbit hole a few years ago, so his name always makes me smile. The Vantucky locals typically say Chuckalov or similar, and look blankly at anything close to ˈtɕkaləf

>The Vantucky locals typically say Chuckalov or similar, and look blankly at anything close to ˈtɕkaləf

Well, native Russian speakers themselves often pronounce it as "Chickaloff".

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#39

Post by fsckboy »

rodary wrote: post #18
pacaro wrote: post #9

I love that he name checks and quotes Chkalov. Not that I expect anyone to know who Chkalov was, but there's a Chkalov Drive in Vancouver WA, and I went down the "how do I pronounce that, who is it named for" rabbit hole a few years ago, so his name always makes me smile. The Vantucky locals typically say Chuckalov or similar, and look blankly at anything close to ˈtɕkaləf

You don't need a t there (native Russian speaker), it's a clear ch like in check. This is a common mistake when transliterating the Russian ч (ch), t doesn't add anything. In fact, t makes it more difficult to pronounce it while it's an easy sound for most people to say.

> You don't need a t there (native Russian speaker), it's a clear ch like in check.

English can inherit some of its spellings historically from French, the language of diplomacy prior to the wars. In French the tch is necessary for pronunciation, like tchécoslovaquie. Also, American English gets various spellings from a number of different Slavic and German immigrant groups. There just isn't "a way" to spell many of these place names and terms, like borsch/borscht/borshch

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#40

Post by hansbo »

gbuk2013 wrote: post #30
DrSAR wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That t is not entirely useless (non-native Russian speaker here). Even the pronunciation of 'check' has a starting t sound in it: tʃɛk. Without the starting t, you might end up with something that could be spelled sheck in English. So I'd argue, that the t in transliterations helps people who don't speak Russian to get the ч sound right. Since the transliteration as 'ch' is ambiguous and doesn't appear to work for ma…

(Native Russian speaker here) I don’t really agree. The “t” and “ch” require very different tongue and jaw positions and combining them is awkward and would require a vowel in between when used in a real word. English speakers are perfectly capable of pronouncing ch vs sh (e.g. chair vs share) whereas sh vs sh’ (ш/щ) might be more challenging.

The IPA of chair also contains a t though:

/t͡ʃɛə(ɹ)/

I think it makes sense. To me there is a clear difference between chair and sheet, where chair starts with the sound of a t. Same thing with Ч.

Post reply on HN