So I watched this thing on the History Channel about Tsarist Russia today. I thought it was strange that in the ads for it they had the R's and N's backwards to make it seem like they were drawing on the Cyrillic script to emphasize an exotic Russia. Of course, the Я is a "ya" sound and the И is an "ee" sound. Cute, I suppose. Nintendo did something similar with Tetris.
I never got why Москвa ("Moskva") is translated into English as Moscow. I mean, it's okay if putting an S C and V all together is too much, and Moscov would've been fine. It's probably the same thing with España. We call España Spain because the French speaking Normans called it Espagne and although the two sound almost identical, we like to bastardize French and took out the two e's. Spagn. Not much of a stretch to get to Spain anymore. So we can blame the French for calling Moskva "Moscou"
Then again we can blame the Romans for having that whole "We use V for U as well" or we can blame them, the Italians and some other Indo-Europeans for having a great difficulty in distinguishing between V and W. When I was living in the dorms I knew a girl from Pakistan who had trouble with that. Maybe we can blame her since she saw me wearing a robe and said "That robe makes yoo look soohhh gey." Luckily I have my black "Kotobuki" robe.
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