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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I know this is massively off-topic (have a good well paid "retirement" Igor), but I assumed that it would be written as

Dos Vidaniya

instead of (the correct)

Do svidanyia

My Russian studies is limited to listening to Sean Connery in The Russia House, and I guess I took Dos from the latin languages. Odd.

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It's worse than that, the first thing that I scanned in the article is if he is alive. A title like that without a pre-defined context more often, in my native Russian perception, could mean much worse that just leaving a company. I'm glad he's doing well, I really enjoy NGINX as a casual user. It is a great gift to people. Удачи (good luck) or всего хорошего (best wishes) would not trigger such a reaction to scan the article for me.

I've just counted: only on the 13th paragraph I could get the answer.

Maybe it was just some sort of click bait to keep the reader on the page...

I would rather think machine translation and learning foreign languages should be better in general. But that is probably a C2-level subtlety, so if a non-Russian was writing that I could understand.

I imagine a situation: EN copywriter asks a RU colleague how to say "Goodbye", gets "Do svidaniya" as a transliteration without a context, and just puts it there. Which sounds like farewell.

maybe they've updated, but the fourth paragraph is currently "we announce today Igor has chosen to step back..."

which would seem to imply "not dead". but given the tone of the first three paragraphs i think even that is a bit too late in the post to clarify.

I "scanned" the article twice, so could have missed. First time I did quit, because HN comments are often more clear and useful instead of "reading" every noise they publish out there. And I did not find what I was looking for. The second time I scanned again after I posted, just to find the paragraph if it was there at all. Even if it was in the 4th originally, it's still far too off. It should have been in the first sentence of the first paragraph.

Yeah, but that's like the fourth paragraph.

I know hardly any Russian, only about enough to recognise "da svidanja" as "goodbye", so I'm not sure "in what language" I digested the headline (=link here on HN) -- probably a bit of all of my eclectic blend of European ones... But to me it certainly felt fifty-fifty whether it was a "changed jobs" or a "dearly departed" post. Checking which it was probably constituted my main reason for clicking through.

As another native Russian speaker, to me the headline explicitly did mean that Igor is alive, and the subsequent meeting would be in the physical plane of our existence. Had it been one of the closer synonyms of "Good bye", I myself would have surmised the worst.

It sounds the same to an american english speaker without knowing a word of Russian since we can infer context and use the same farewell structure for the deceased.

> the first thing that I scanned in the article is if he is alive

Same thing, my first reaction was "oh my god, no, please no" and I rushed to see if he's alive.

I know zero Russian, or any other language other than English. I had a very similar reaction to you. It sounded almost like an obituary.

Do (до) is basically “till”

Svidaniye (Свидание) has several meanings:

- most common modern single-word usage is for date as in “romantic date”

- archaic is for “meeting” that remained in this goodbye form.

So “do svidaniya” is literally for “till we meet again” :-)

I wonder why is it romanized to "do", when it's read as "da"?

English. The answer is almost always English, and its "quirky" way of transliteration.

I don't think so. From what little Russian I know, the original is до свидания, with an O, but in most dialects an unstressed O is pronounced A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_phonology#Unstressed_v...

It's even more convoluted than that. Due to vowel reduction, unstressed o is pronounced as a, but до is one syllable so the o is stressed. When pronouncing до separately, it would definitely be pronounced as do, but до свидания is always said quickly as if it was one word, so the до turns into an unstressed syllable.

As a side note, Russian pronunciation is remarkably uniform compared to languages like English. Dialects do exist but in practice the vast majority of speakers will pronounce things very similarly. The phonetics are also so different from English than the typical English speaker will not pronounce any Russian words close to native pronunciation.

Interesting, thank you. Years ago I tried to learn Russian by myself, but it was quite difficult and I was too busy with other stuff. I hope one day I can learn it.

> As a side note, Russian pronunciation is remarkably uniform compared to languages like English.

AFAICT, that goes for absolutely every other language too. Nothing even comes close to English for inconsistency in pronounciation (and even more so, spelling).

Because it's spelt "do" in Russian. It's only due to stress and the fact it's a preposition that the way it is said becomes "da".

As the preposition is so small, it's considered together with the following word, which in the genitive has its stress on the "а".

I had the same thought. I think it's more Slavic vs Germanic/Romantic. "sv", without a vowel, doesn't exist in any word I can think of. However, in Russian, consonant clusters like that are pretty common. See also, from the article, Sberbank. I'd bet there's plenty of examples in reverse too.

svelte is probably the most common english one

Ah that's a good one!

s: with, together

vid: videt' = to see, vid as in video

anie: just a suffix like "ing" in english

"till together-seeing"

The process is called “Romanization of Russian” [1], and there are various standard ways to do it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian

I thought it was a typo and meant to say "to". Why not use Cyrillic here? Bit odd.

Dos Svidanya would be a great cocktail name.

Or early PC software.

do (till) svidaniya (seeing, i think it's called gerundive in english grammar)

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