#helluva engineer

[cosima-is-bae]

My personal fav yikyak for finals week just encapsulates a whole ass mood

[iamliberalartsgt]

Sometimes the best way to learn is...accidentally

If you haven’t realized yet based on some of my previous posts, my three favorite things in life are books, foreign languages, and really old stuff (all of which I hoard like some kind of antiques dragon, but unfortunately that’s not the topic of this post). So it’s no surprise that I really love what I’m currently doing at work: helping catalog the museum’s entire book collection. 

Most of the books in the museum are about paper and papermaking (no surprise there), and they can seem a bit dry if that’s not what you’re into. However, what keeps things interesting is when the book teaches you something new--completely unrelated to the subject of the text itself. 

Enter the book, Палеографическое Значение Бумажныж Водяныхъ Знаков. This is a set of Russian-language volumes we have that were printed in St. Petersburg in 1899. Now, we clearly can’t read every language in our collection, but I brought out my one-and-a-half-years of Russian in order to at least get a transliteration of the title, the author, and try (using my beloved Russian-English dictionary) to get a rough translation of the title.

However, there were certain things in the book that made me question if it was even in Russian:

Specifically, I am talking about the ѣ and the і. Those aren’t letters that are in the Russian alphabet, but my fellow Russian-learners will be able to tell that the words are definitely Russian, not something else. So what is it?

After some digging, I found the answer. The ѣ (called a ‘yat’) and the i were two of the four letters that were eliminated from the Russian alphabet in 1917-1918, shortly after the Revolution. Why? Did Lenin have something personal against these letters? Well, from what I gathered it was mainly because they were redundant -- equivalent to the other letters е and и, respectively. So, they just got rid of them. They also stopped using the ъ after many words and phrases, as it was also seen as redundant. 

So, that snip of a phrase you see there, “сомнѣнiе въ,” would be written as “сомнение в” today, and that’s something I never would have even known about if it hadn’t been for this rather boring volume of books on the “Paleographic Significance of Paper Watermarks” (and now it’s a fun fact you know too!).