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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 10pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face=Calibri>Hello Everyone,<?xml:namespace prefix = "o" ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 10pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face=Calibri>First I would like to thank Paul Rakow, Kateryna Kyshynska, and Perry for their translations and all the people who gave their helpful suggestions and translations.<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 10pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face=Calibri>I would also like to tell you what I have learned so that others don’t give up on old family letters that seem to be gibberish. The Russian Imperial government as well as the Soviet government Russified people in Russia. They forced them to use Russian instead of their native language (i.e. Polish, Yiddish, German, Hebrew). The government policy of the day changed from Czarist times to Soviet times but generally limited the education of non-Russian people so while they had to use Russian in most legal documents, many didn’t have the opportunity to learn Russian in school. Many of our ancestors ended up speaking poor Russian as their primary language and their native language as a secondary language which was only used in the home.<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 10pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face=Calibri>My letters show the poor education level these people had which isn’t a condemnation, only a fact that has to be acknowledged when looking at such correspondence. These people were never taught grammar, spelling, and the whole idea of telling a story with a beginning, middle and end. So, expect incorrect spelling. The writer may not have known the correct spelling so he spelled it phonetically which leads to some errors. Not only that, but other spelling errors come in to play because they probably didn’t know about umlaut characters and used Roman Script and dipthongs instead (ir for ihr, i for ü, u for oh, etc.). Sometimes the writer only occasionally wrote in German (native language) but thought in Russian and mentally translated to German as he went. This leads to substituting a Russian “d” for a “b” while writing in German because the Russian handwritten glyph “b” looks like a Roman “d” especially on the end of words. The writer has to instead think of a German “b” but write the Russian glyph for “v” which looks like western Roman “d”. I hope that makes sense to you.<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 10pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face=Calibri>Other times these people knew the Russian word but not the German word (or Polish, or Yiddish, or Hebrew) so they took the Russian word and used it changing the ending of the word to make it match the use in the sentence (i.e. nominative, adjectival, etc). So you get a word like bolnise which came from the Russian <SPAN lang=RU style="mso-ansi-language: RU">больница</SPAN> (hospital/infirmary). Notice that the spelling bolnise doesn’t exactly match the Russian word because of the ending. Another example is praiswodstwa which comes from the Russian <SPAN lang=RU style="mso-ansi-language: RU">производство </SPAN>meaning small plant or small factory (they ran a hog processing plant). One final peculiar thing about my letter is the writer didn’t use periods at the end of sentences. One just runs into another so if you don’t understand a sentence you don’t know where it ends.<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 10pt"><FONT size=3><FONT face=Calibri>I hope this inspires people to look at their family letters again to try translations or, as I did, ask for help. <o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></P></BODY></html>