Michael Pronay wrote:
> (DK) wrote:
>
> Anyhow, being back from a 10 day wine trip to the Balkans
> (Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Monenegro),
Michael, would you please share your experiences (when you have
time, of course)? I myself am back from a 3-week stay in Bulgaria (not
for wine-tasting purposes only, unfortunately), and found the wine scene
frizzling, as it were
.
> this helped
> very much in deciphering Cyrillic. The inverted "R" is "ya". What
> about the "b", btw, they told me it's a kind of "softener"?
>
Yes, it softens the consonant it succeeds. When between a consonant
an a vowel, it turns the vowel into an umlaut. (In Bulgarian, this is
only used to turn o into ö, because the other umlauts are either not
used, or have dedicated letters of their own).
>>The letter is ""zh", not "h" or "x".
>
>
> I was not talking about "h" or "x", only describing the letter.
> Anyhow - why "zh" and not "j", as "Jean-Jack" would suggest?
>
Maybe because of the convention of the Western Slavists for
transliterating Cyrillic? I don't know what DK's reasons for writing it
that way are, but from what I remember, the convention is to use 'zh'
for the letter (and for the sound in "Jean"), while 'j' is used for the
umlauts: your letter "inverted R" is transliterated as 'ja'. In this
convention, for Bulgarian, 'y' is used to represent the sound 'uh' (the
sound for u in "but" or "Bulgaria"), where the Cyrillic letter is the
one similar to the "b" you're talking about, but with a tail on top.
--
No, no, you can't e-mail me with no no.