Dredging up the Russian for conlang geekery.

First of all, the table below won't make as much sense if you don't have a Cyrillic fontset installed, because all the vowels are Russian vowels. (Or at least, what I can remember of Russian vowels from the half-semester of Russian 1 I took several eons ago -- 1998 is eons ago.) I'm sure there's folks on my friends list who will be happy to correct my hazy memory if I've missed something.

Anyway, my notes from the time, as we were planning to write a story set in my fictional land of Marraketh (which I tend to abbrevriate mketh, so you don't get confused later), my notes read "the language is similar sounding to Russian". Of course, I was *taking* Russian at the time, hence my obsession, and while I think I meant the sounds zh,ch,sh,and xh (the last is the ch in Bach, for those more familiar with that word), I think the direction I'll take is playing with vowel sounds. 'cause there was one thing that I remember being cool with the vowels -- they come in pairs. Check out the following table:

Vowel	Sound	Vowel	Sound
а	ah	я	yah
и	ee	е	yee
о	oh	ё	yo
у	ooh	ю	you

Hence катя would be pronounced 'kaht-yah', roughly, or Katya, which is what some friends still call me to this day. ;) But the point's made.

(I should fairly point out that there's a couple other vowelish letters, but I don't remember how they work, so I'm going to studiously pretend they don't exist until I'm told otherwise.)

( And now we descend into the conlang geekery -- follow if you're curious for my musings on mkethian vowel sounds )

And now that that's out of my head, let's see if I can get pen applied to *paper* tomorrow and get something *written* that isn't conlang geekery. [And boy do I need a 'i am a big huge geek' icon.]