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11-14-2024, 10:48 AM | #11 | |||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
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The paymasters will simply be unable to secure enough people with the right skill sets and perfect idiomatic Russian, largely because most of those people are probably already working for an intelligence or security agency in the West trying to prevent the collapse of the USSR from turning into nightmare scenarios like loose nukes everywhere, and would be more likely to report an attempt to recruit them for private adventuring during sensitive times than to accept. Those whom the paymasters do manage to recruit will have to adopt a variety of undercover and just low-profile identities during the course of their recruiting and characters who are totally unable to pass as Russians will likely resort to cover stories like:
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But those selecting recruiters would like to avoid approaching anyone who is actually still part of the SIS or the Security Service, though they'd happily snap up one of the Russian or Eastern European experts who were RIF-ed as Western democracies eagerly begin spending their 'peace dividend' on all sorts of things that are not the Cold War. Lot of spies and soldiers lost their jobs or are facing the prospect of doing so in the next few months. So, for the most part, they're turning to friends or friends of friends of the people they know in England (several have family there), of whom some are indeed part of the Establishment, the intelligence and security services, the Foreign Service and the military.
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11-15-2024, 08:14 AM | #12 |
Join Date: Feb 2020
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Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
https://youtu.be/L9fz50lQoZU?si=b4oP-RDYqy_G0e07&t=1320
It is not direct to your question and describes situation that happened in 2007-2009 and a person whose age we don't know. But it is still a short linguistic anecdote (from minute 22 to minute 24, continued at 35m15s, no more is needed) that might be interesting. There is even espionage involved. A kind of. Last edited by Thökk; 11-15-2024 at 08:27 AM. |
11-15-2024, 09:22 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
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11-15-2024, 02:28 PM | #14 | ||
Join Date: Feb 2020
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Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
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*Checks the unsent comment.* I guess later is now. Quote:
Last edited by Thökk; 11-15-2024 at 02:38 PM. |
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11-16-2024, 11:57 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Russian Dialect / Genderlect - What Are 'Unintentional Drill Tweets'?
Assume that everything I know about online video games, I learned from books and interviews with victims. I'm just looking for whether any of the linguistic peculiarities would apply before the Iron Curtain fell and the rate of the spread of global culture accelerated exponentially with the popularization of the Internet and the terminally online.
I actually know more than I want about EVE Online, as a business and social pĥenomena, though I've never played the game or any other MMO. Eve Fan Fests are obviously held here in Reykjavík, CCP Games was a client of our firm almost since their founding, several of my friends were long-time players, one was an artist and writer for the game, etc. But what does 'unintentional drill tweets' mean? Is the 'drill' meant in the sense of military drill, postulating a possible origin of the 'genderlect' within the military culture of conscript soldiers, a society that in the 1980s mostly or totally excluded females, and along with prisons are among the most likely institutions to house the development of a genderlect in an industrialized society? And would that mean that some form of such genderlect should have existed in the 1980s and into 1990-1991?
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11-17-2024, 01:52 AM | #16 | ||||
Join Date: Feb 2020
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Re: Russian Dialect / Genderlect - What Are 'Unintentional Drill Tweets'?
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The criminal precursor to it has the name "fenya" which has it's own history. I'm not speaking as a scholar here, more like trying to gather my impression from being in observation distance from said phenomena. But it definitely existed in the in the last 50 years more or less in an unbroken continuum. If you are not part of it, you definitely know how it sounds and could know the meaning of some words through cultural osmosis of sorts. Quote:
Internet in the 90s was a very niche, very different place, so it was its own culture for a while, back then, having roots in Fidonet, and the mass adoption only began at around late 00s, I think? Last edited by Thökk; 11-17-2024 at 04:46 AM. |
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11-17-2024, 01:53 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Feb 2020
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Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
It's a haphazard answer, I hope it makes sense.
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11-17-2024, 08:41 AM | #18 | |||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Russian Dialect / Genderlect - What Are 'Unintentional Drill Tweets'?
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In a campaign set in 1990-1991, basically none of the PCs will have learned Russian through immersion in contemporary Russian culture. At the absolute best, they have spoken with people who left Warsaw Pact countries at some point in the 1980s, but more likely, the Russian culture they learned alongside their language education was the culture of pre-Communist Russian literature. Either their teachers, or the people whose sensibilities influenced their teachers, would have spoken an archaic, literary, aristocratic version of Russian, the kind of Russian you'd use to recite Pushkin and Lermontov, and read aloud from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Aside from the heroic efforts of the French YMCA Press, in publishing Solzhenitsyn's seminal work and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, banned and censored in their home countries, respectively, the most modern Russian literature which most of them would be likely to know would be Pasternak and Nabokov, with the latter even writing his most celebrated works in English. Quote:
During the time most Western people who spoke Russian in 1990-1991 were learning their language skills, Soviet defectors were rare and often employed by the intelligence agencies who helped them to defect. Exceptions would mostly be Jewish people from former Warsaw Pact countries, granted permits to emigrate to Israel. Probably the only country accessible to Western powers where colloquial, modern Russian could fairly easily be found spoken in the 1980s would be Israel, and even then, most of those who emigrated from behind the Iron Curtain to Israel would be learning to speak Hebrew, not trying to maintain currency in Russian slang trends as they happen in the countries they left behind. Characters who learned their Russian from the Defense Language Institute (DLI) or went through advanced courses as part of their work in Western intelligence, military or security agencies would probably have spoken with defectors who spoke modern Russian. Or, at least, Russian which was modern when they left, which might have been many years before. Characters who have a degree in Russian from Cambridge, Oxford, Cornell, or one of the constituent universities of Sorbonne University, will probably only have spoken to people who speak the literary, pre-Soviet Russian of expatriates. Yes, for the purposes of a campaign set in 1990-1991, the Internet is irrelevant.
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