Translation from Russian needed

[WeepingElf]

I need a translation of the following Russian quote:

V obrashchenii mezhu sovoy oni byli delikatny i ostorozhny [...], i kogda nuzhno bylo komu nibud' skazat' chto libo nepriyatnoe, to ono govorilos' ne pryamo, a namezhami ili v tret'em lice.

Thanks in advance.

[Mecislau]

I need a translation of the following Russian quote:

V obrashchenii mezhu sovoy oni byli delikatny i ostorozhny [...], i kogda nuzhno bylo komu nibud' skazat' chto libo nepriyatnoe, to ono govorilos' ne pryamo, a namezhami ili v tret'em lice.

Thanks in advance.

There's a number of mistakes there, but...

"As regards their manner amongst themselves, they were delicate and careful [...], and when someone needed to say anything unpleasant, it was not said directly, but discreetly and in the third person."


Corrected text:
Vo obraščeniji meždu soboj oni byli delikatny i ostorožny [...], i kogda nužno bylo komu-nibud' skazat' čto-libo neprijatnoje, to ono govorilos' ne prjamo, a namëkami ili v tret'jem lice.

[WeepingElf]

Thank you!

[Travis B.]

Corrected text:
Vo obraščeniji meždu soboj oni byli delikatny i ostorožny [...], i kogda nužno bylo komu-nibud' skazat' čto-libo neprijatnoje, to ono govorilos' ne prjamo, a namëkami ili v tret'jem lice.

On another note, why won't people write Russian this way in Latin script all the time (as opposed to the more ad-hoc ways of writing things in Russian in Latin script that I have seen)...

[Bristel]

Corrected text:
Vo obraščeniji meždu soboj oni byli delikatny i ostorožny [...], i kogda nužno bylo komu-nibud' skazat' čto-libo neprijatnoje, to ono govorilos' ne prjamo, a namëkami ili v tret'jem lice.

On another note, why won't people write Russian this way in Latin script all the time (as opposed to the more ad-hoc ways of writing things in Russian in Latin script that I have seen)...

Nationalism. History. Mix well until blended.

[Niedokonany]

Do they even teach any standard Roman orthography at Russian schools? If not, it's no wonder people use various Englishy conventions in the internet rather than sth more reasonable and Slavic-looking. Even if they do, there might be various reasons (e.g. problems with typing the carons; subculture).

[Xonen]

Corrected text:
Vo obraščeniji meždu soboj oni byli delikatny i ostorožny [...], i kogda nužno bylo komu-nibud' skazat' čto-libo neprijatnoje, to ono govorilos' ne prjamo, a namëkami ili v tret'jem lice.

On another note, why won't people write Russian this way in Latin script all the time (as opposed to the more ad-hoc ways of writing things in Russian in Latin script that I have seen)...

The fact that the standardized romanization systems aren't awfully well known might have something to do with it... Then again, some of them pretty much look like ad hoc attempts to represent Russian with English orthography, so it's also possible that you simply can't tell the difference. Many of these systems seem to be intended mainly for English-speakers with no knowledge of Russian who need to pronounce the names of Russian hockey players and stuff like that, so for that purpose, I guess similarity to English is a plus. A system with diacritics and "weird" stuff like <c> for /ts/ basically needs to be learned as a whole new orthography, after all.

[shinkarom]

Don't know if someone accepts, but if at least one of forum members lets me, I will post my version of Russian Latin script.

[hwhatting]

A system with diacritics and "weird" stuff like <c> for /ts/ basically needs to be learned as a whole new orthography, after all.

Plus diacritics are incovenient in the contexts where Russian speakers are most prone to using Latinica - when texting on a cell phone or posting on the internet using an English keyboard.

"As regards their manner amongst themselves, they were delicate and careful [...], and when someone needed to say anything unpleasant, it was not said directly, but discreetly and in the third person."
...
a namëkami ili v tret'jem lice.

... or in the third person.

[Mecislau]

"As regards their manner amongst themselves, they were delicate and careful [...], and when someone needed to say anything unpleasant, it was not said directly, but discreetly and in the third person."
...
a namëkami ili v tret'jem lice.

... or in the third person.

Whoops! Figures I'd figure out what the heck "namezhami" was supposed to be and typo on "or".

Don't know if someone accepts, but if at least one of forum members lets me, I will post my version of Russian Latin script.

There's nothing wrong with you trying. Just be aware that some aspects of Russian spelling (like indicating palatalization) are tricky enough to mark using Latin script that, well, I've yet to see any scheme that both succeeds in doing it and is aesthetically pleasing.

[shinkarom]

Translation:

In conversation with each other they used to be delicate and careful... when the need to say something unpleasant arose, they said it not direct, but with hinting or in third person.

Not namezhami, but namekami.
In Russian:

В обращении между собой они были деликатны и осторожны... и когда нужно было кому-нибудь сказать что-либо неприятное, то оно говорилось не прямо, а намеками или в третьем лице.

In my Russian Latin alphabet:

V obraşenii meždu soboy oni bıli delikatnı i ostorožnı... i kogda nužno bılo komu-nibudy skazaty čto-libo nepriyatnoe, to ono govorilosy ne prämo, a namökami ili v tretyem lice.

Don't think bad, I am Ukrainian myself and have Russian as my first language. I used Turkish letters not to make the alphabet more Turkish.

[Mecislau]

In my Russian Latin alphabet:

V obraşenii meždu soboy oni bıli delikatnı i ostorožnı... i kogda nužno bılo komu-nibudy skazaty čto-libo nepriyatnoe, to ono govorilosy ne prämo, a namökami ili v tretyem lice.

Don't think bad, I am Ukrainian myself and have Russian as my first language. I used Turkish letters not to make the alphabet more Turkish.

That's actually interesting; I don't think I've ever seen a Turkic-style orthography for Russian.

A few questions/comments:

1) Why do you use ş, but ž and č? Wouldn't it be more consistent to use z̧ and ç? So it'd look like this:

V obraşenii mez̧du soboy oni bıli delikatnı i ostoroz̧nı... i kogda nuz̧no bılo komu-nibudy skazaty çto-libo nepriyatnoe, to ono govorilosy ne prämo, a namökami ili v tretyem lice.

2) I see you're using "y" for both й and ь. That's definitely doable; I've seen proposals for Russian that merge й and ь as well, so that "собой" (for instance) would be respelled собоь (which looks incredibly weird to me, granted, but there is some logic to it). As far as I know there isn't any place where this is actually ambiguous, although it'd take some getting used to to read "skazaty" as /skazatʲ/ rather than /skazatɨ/!

3) I see you mark intervocalic /j/ as "y" for ия in "nepriyatnoe", but why not for ое? Why is it "nepriyatnoe" and not "nepriyatnoye"?

4) How would you handle words with the hard sign ъ?

5) How do you distinguish Е and Э?

[Silk]

Also you would have to use <yy> in cases like семья (semyya) to distinguish from words like семя (semya).

Edit: Unless you're going to use <ä> instead...semyä versus semä.
So if <ä> is supposed to be <я> in прямо, why not have nepriätnoe or nepriätnoye?

I suggest using <ë> for э in the Latin orthography if you aren't going to use <ye> for Cyrillic e. I suggest this simply because <e> in Russian is much more common than <э>.

Edit 2: Also...if you really want to go Turkish, you should use <ts> rather than <c> for /ts/, because in Turkish <c> represents /dZ/. You could use <j> for <ж> since that's how it is in Turkish, and the letter doesn't seem to be used elsewhere in your orthography, and I personally like it better then z-cedilla.

[shinkarom]

1) I used ş only because š is already mapped to ш.
2) After writing some sentences in my version I have seen no ambiguous situations.
3)I am not using ye for е because Russians rarely say this letter may represent two sounds.
4)No hard sign yet, but propositions are welcome.
5) ё for э was my first thought and I couldn't think about nothing more fitting, although for native Russians it will take some time to adapt to ё.

Silk, as I said, I am not trying to make this alphabet a child of Turkish one. ş was used only because the letter щ must be associated with s. ı was used only because I know no other Latin alphabet letters for ы.
Silk, semya versus semä.
Diaeresis is not used in situations where, by Russian spelling, the letter я, ё, ю represents two sounds: йа, йо, йу.

[Mecislau]

1) I used ş only because š is already mapped to ш.

Oh, whoops. When you said you were using a more Turkic style orthography I just assumed ş was /ʃ/ without actually looking at what the word was...

5) ё for э was my first thought and I couldn't think about nothing more fitting, although for native Russians it will take some time to adapt to ё.

I'd recommend against that, personally. It would make your use of the diacritic inconsistent: on ä and ö it marks palatalization, but not ë it would mark lack of palatalization...

[Silk]

I would ordinarily support using <ë> for a palatalized e for consistency's sake, but I find it ugly when orthographies use a letter with a diacritic more than the letter without it. This would be the case in Russian, because <э> is such an uncommon letter, whereas <e> occurs all the time. An alternative option would to use <ė> for <э>, and say that <e> is a naturally palatalized/soft letter (whereas <a o u> are naturally unpalatalized/hard letters), and the dot over the e would simply negate the palatalization. So that way, a dot over a letter would mean hardening a vowel that is soft, and two dots over a letter would mean softening a vowel that is hard. The only problem is <i ı> which violates this rule...do you plan to use <ï> in this orthography anywhere?

As for the hard sign, I suggest an apostrophe, because you aren't using it for the soft sign, and I don't see them elsewhere in your orthography.

If you don't want to use <ı> for <ы>, I recommend <ŭ>. It's used in Korean transcription for /M/, which is a similar sound.

[shinkarom]

I thought about ē as э and í as ы.
The apostrophe will be the hard sign.

Ya pomnü čudnoe mgnovenye:
Peredo mnoy yavilasy tí
Kak mimolötnoe videnye,
Kak geniy čistoy krasotí.

[Nortaneous]

but what is the point of doing something like that when you could have an orthography that is fairly intuitive to speakers of european langs

V obraščenii meždu soboj oni byli delikatny i ostorožny [...], i kogda nužno bylo komu-nibud' skazat' čto-libo neprijatnoje, to ono govorilos' ne prjamo, a namjokami(?) ili v tret'jem lice.

[Silk]

Here is my version.

V obraşénii méždu sobój oní býli delikátny i ostoróžny...i kogdá núžno býlo komú-nibúdь skazátь čto-libo nepriátnoe, to onó govorílosь ne prãmo, a namõkami íli v trétьem licé.

e = e
é = stressed e
ĕ = э
ē = stressed э

ä = я
a = я when between vowels, á if stressed
ă = a between vowels, but ā in материал, since it is stressed (materiāl)

õ = ё (because it is always stressed)

[schwhatever]

Romanized Cyrillic makes baby jesus cry. I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. That shit has evolved over centuries and completely reworking it is going to lose something in the process.

[shinkarom]

I'm deeply sorry too, but can't help going into sarcasm.
schwhatever, IMHO with this words you deny pinyin and romaji. I see the following corollary from your words: romanizing Chinese or Japanese or even Turkish (what have been done) is senseless because existing scripts evolved over centuries too. And what about Serbian? Uzbek? Punjabi? They use two scripts.
I may be completely wrong in what I said, but don't bite me for noobism.
Please don't feel offended. And, schwatewer, I wish you would not use vulgarisms.

[hwhatting]

Here is my version.

The orthography looks like some crossover between Czech and Turkish.

[Nortaneous]

I'm deeply sorry too, but can't help going into sarcasm.
schwhatever, IMHO with this words you deny pinyin and romaji. I see the following corollary from your words: romanizing Chinese or Japanese or even Turkish (what have been done) is senseless because existing scripts evolved over centuries too. And what about Serbian? Uzbek? Punjabi? They use two scripts.
I may be completely wrong in what I said, but don't bite me for noobism.
Please don't feel offended. And, schwatewer, I wish you would not use vulgarisms.

Except he has a point. Cyrillic is suited to Russian in a way that Latin could never pull off, so you definitely lose something in the process of transliteration. Arabic Turkish is a different issue; the Arabic script is suited to Arabic, but not to Turkish. (And Latin is more suited to Turkish than it is to English... hell, why did we ever stop using the runes?)

[schwhatever]

What on earth do you mean by "denying" romaji and pinyin? I think you mean saying that native scripts better represent the language. I'm not qualified to talk about pinyin because I've never even tried to learn it, but I have studied Japanese, and I think there's a lot of key differences between romaji and romanized Russian. So, there's a lot of problems with the comparison you're creating between romaji and any (of the various) de-Cyrillicized Russian, particularly:

1. Competing systems. Romaji has a single, particular form that has been endorsed (at least somewhat) by the Japanese government (or rather, that's why there's a single mainstream approach, because the government has favored a particular method). There have been various historical attempts to represent Japanese using Roman lettering, but there's a particular form (or, technically speaking two closely related forms) that are so incredibly popular that it doesn't make any sense anymore to use the now archaic romanizations. The Russian government (for the nationalistic reasons some one mentioned earlier in this thread) has never promoted a particular form of romanization, so we have a hodgepodge of different methods - some of them following more the Czech orthography, others clearly aiming towards a more Anglophone-friendly result. The idea of trying to write Russian with Latin letters isn't new, so you need to explain why your system is better. Failing that, if this is just an exercise in artistic license, why did you make the choices you did? In short, how does your orthography resolve the complexities in representing Russian in Latin better (or just differently) than its predecessors?

2. Phonetic Representation. A large part of the drive within Japan for adoption of a romanized alternative to hirigana/katakana/kanji was to make Japanese more accessible to foreigners more familiar with alphabetic systems (and hence phonetic representation). Russian doesn't really have that drive, since it already has an alphabet. As a result, romanized Japanese expresses a fundamentally different conception of how writing can represent the language, when compared to kanji (and a lesser extent, katakana and hirigana). It absolutely does give up certain advantages and complexities that only those three systems can really fully capture (mainly historical connections, but also a more clear representation of the morae), but in order to attain something that they have a lot of difficulty expressing (more explicitly phonetic representation). In the case of Russian, however, this is connected to the previous point, since a Romanization is simply trading one alphabetic system for another. So again, I'll ask, how has this switch improved Russian communication?

3. Phonemes. Lastly, it seems clear that a romanized Russian will require extensive manipulation of the existing Latin alphabet. Japanese romaji never had to encounter that problem primarily because Japanese has a smaller (and more commonplace) inventory. I suspect that this is where some problems come up for Chinese romanizations as well Russian romanizations, simply because Latin writing never had to deal with some of these languages important phonetic distinctions (namely, tone and palatalization, but also simply differently shaped inventories). The idea that the Roman alphabet is somehow one size fits all is patently false. Most adoptions of it (Turkish most recently, but all sorts of medieval manipulations) have also been adaptations of it. There's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion, but it leads you straight back into the questions from bullet point number 1: how do your particular adaptations of the Roman alphabet improve Russian, compared to the exiting Cyrillic system?

I'm sorry if this is harsh (and I'm honestly not trying to pick on you or anything), but I think another essential ingredient here is what audience this romanization will have. If you want to write Russian using Latin letters, awesome, go and enjoy. It truly seems, however, that you don't want to just write it in that manner but have others (at least on some level) appreciate it. All I'm trying to say is that if you want that, then you have to give people a reason to admire it. It needs to somehow improve Russian, if we're to suppose to see it and think its better than the original.

[shinkarom]

1. Competing systems. I created this version because all of existing transcriptions are innacurate. Therefore there is a need to make an unambiguous version. What about governmental endorsing? Most Russians are chauvinists, and I wanted to make something connected to Russian culture (even if not to big part of it) but not conservative. It reads natural to me. By the way, my project is not made to completely erase Cyrillic Russian, only to be an official Latin version or alternate alphabet to transfer words from one script to another without losses.

2. Phonetic Representation. The next question: why Moldovian language got Cyrillic orthography? The existing Romanian was alot more comfortable for native speakers (I think). To make it accessible for Russian-speaking majority. (Why they did not made a Cyrillic version for Georgian or Estonian is another question). I used Serbian Latin orthography as basis for my project. If we had only such pragmatical motivations as you say in point 2, this forum would be useless. There would never be Ido that strips Esperanto of its diacritic letters; because, you know, the exisiting Esperanto is already better. The answer is: the artistic license.

3. Phonemes. Yes, you may say that Turkish Latin was introduced because Arabic script did not fit. You may say the same about hangeul. I could say that French orthography or Swedish is barbarian too from the first sight. I have no more arguments to say.

I feel I can convince no one. But I can't find another frum where'd talked about conlangs but were not so serious. schwhatever, you are not harsh. And you come to this subject too serious.