Comments

  1. René says

    The font for the subtitle apparently doesn’t allow for accents. As Russian only uses accents sporadically (educational material, dictionaries) you may want to just delete the accent. пра́вда and правда are both correct and one word.

  2. René says

    Oops. It was correct in the preview! The only correct spelling would be the acute ON the a, and not next to it!

  3. Susan Montgomery says

    @1. The real fun with accents is that if you put it in the wrong place while speaking you wind up using a totally different word.

  4. blf says

    René@2, The acute accent is on the a here, both in the rendered version and the XHTML source, for both comment @1 and the OP’s “subtitle”. I won’t pretend to diagnose the problem, but suspect it’s something at your end (browser settings, local fonts, messed-up encoding (conversion?), …?).

    Test: Is the acute accent on the a in which of the following two lines?
    1. á — UTF-8 encoded U+00E1 (LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE)
    2. á — XHMTL entity &aacute
    This is not a complete test, there are other ways of adding an acute accent, nor could I find a “Cyrillic a with accent”-type character.

  5. blf says

    me@5, and now I got borked by Preview! The two “tests” are the same (both 1) in the published version…

  6. René says

    @blf: Yup. In the preview it appears correct here too. I think the problem has something to do with fact that the acute accent used is a combining diacritical entered after the a. It is not a single character — for which Russian has/had no use.

  7. René says

    @Susan. I think you may be confusing stress and accent and diacriticals. (Always fun to italicize full stops.)

  8. blf says

    René@7, Yeah that sounds reasonable, single glyphs from multiple codepoints are a notorious bugaboo.

  9. Susan Montgomery says

    @8 quite possibly. I got into a pair of Soviet-era Russian sci-fi authors a few years back and picked up a little Russian along the way, but I’m hardly an expert :)

  10. birgerjohansson says

    Susan Montgomery @10
    A fellow enthusiast of East European science fiction! I worship at the altar of Lem, Strugatsky & Strugatsky.

  11. hemidactylus says

    Russia gave us the authors Yevgeny Zamyatin and Alisa Rosenbaum. We are forever in her debt. The former wrote an influential dystopian novel. The latter helped create a dystopia.

  12. Rob Grigjanis says

    Tarkovsky’s Solaris (based on Lem’s novel) is one of the best SF films ever.

  13. blf says

    Back on topic… I listened to all but perhaps the first 3 minutes, and generally found the discussion interesting. There was one point where I notably disagreed, but (a) Wasn’t taking notes, and (b) The vin from dinner isn’t helping, so now cannot remember what it was… ;-\   — which is perhaps also interfering with my ability to make any coherent comment now-ish, other than Thanks!

  14. Susan Montgomery says

    @12. They also gave us Asimov.

    @11. I like Lem’s “Memoirs found in a bathtub”. He out Kafkas Kafka. Sadly, the Strugatskys are becoming a guilty pleasure…

  15. birgerjohansson says

    Susan Montgomery @ 15
    I read Yevgeny Zamyatin in the 70s. Scary pre-orwellian book.
    The film Stalker was very loosely based on the Strugatskys “Piknik na obotjina/Wayside Picnic.
    A book I recommend is “Definitely Maybe”, original title “A billion years to the end of the world “. It was a very Philip K Dick-esque novel, with reality itself buckling sometimes.