Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday   THE language
I am fondest of is Russian. It is a bruised sort of affection,
like the residue of many years with an intense but difficult
lover. No other language has caused me such pain, or given me
such pleasure in the discovery of its quirks and beauty.  It
starts with the pronunciation. Aside from consonants that don't
exist in English and the “soft sign” (represented in this entry
by an apostrophe), which softens the consonant before it, the
vowels in Russian are big beefy things, requiring facial muscles
that never get a workout in English.  For my first few months in
Moscow I felt as if I was chewing pebbles. When I moaned about
it to a Russian friend, he explained that “English is produced
in the back of the mouth, but in Russian”—he puffed out his
lips—“we speak from here, from the front. In order to strengthen
these muscles,” he concluded seriously, “you should perform oral
sex more often.”   Where do you take your ski holidays?AFP
Novosti  Then ther