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Object lesson, the Four Monkeys


red750

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  • 2 months later...
8 hours ago, nomadpete said:

Y'know, the really great thing about Siri (& other brands of her)........

She's the only nagging female voice I can silence with a gentle touch of my finger.

Remember Bitching Betty. Don't know if it's operational yet but I read some time back that the new version will get louder and more aggressive if you ignore her warnings. A lot of married men would be familiar with that in real life.

 

Rita, Russia's Bitching Betty is an interesting lady. Very soft voiced and ladylike. The problem there is that the language has words with a lot of syllables and often many more words than English to say the same thing. So by the time you listen to everything Rita has to say, you've probably already gone splat. Some Yanks call her Nagging Nadia but in her country she's Rita. Comes from the device designation RI-65. RI is an acronym for two words translating roughly as voice informer.

 

In Russian the names of the alphabet letters are the phonetic pronunciation of them. For example, we call 'A' ay as it's name. Russians call A 'ahh' or 'are' as in the long A pronunciation, B is buh or ber, D is duh, M is mer etc.. The letter 'I' is pronounced eye in English, ee in Russian. R is pronounced same as English. So RI is pronounced Ree. They tacked TA on the end to make it Rita and that's how she got her name.

 

The Ruskis pronounce their acronyms as a word, not separate letters. In the West, we tend to speak our acronym designations as separate letters. So a Sukhoi aircraft like the Su-27 we will speak the S and u as separate letters. You hear people pronounce it as Ess You -27 which is not right. It's Su pronounced one word as in 'sue'. In a designation, lower case means it's the second letter of one word (as in the u in Su, ..Sukhoi). If the designation acronym represents two words, they are all capitals (as in Rita's case, RI-65). That's why the middle letter in MiG is lower case. It's the second letter of Mikoyan and the G is for the co-designer Gurevich. By adding Mikoyan's 'i' they can pronounce it 'meeg' instead of 'mer-ger', much nicer.

 

Apologies for thread drift; it's been a slow day.

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