Hannes Hirzel <hirzel at spw.unizh.ch> said:
>> (and it seems that you can get quite far by talking Dutch on a Russian marine
>> ship - Czar Peter learnt the trade here and apparently didn't bother to 
>> translate all the naval terms)
>
>This sounds interesting, could you give some examples?
>
I would if I could. Note that I padded my statement with "seems" and
"apparently", indicating it's hearsay (but it's a common story and I remember
it coming from respectable sources so that I trust to pass it on). 

E.g. http://www.russian-dictionary.org/preface.html, quote: 

  "Historically, Russian technical language has a stable tendency
  (starting with Dutch naval terms introduced by Peter the Great, followed
  by an all-pervasive usage of French, in vogue during and after the
  time of Napoleon, then German in the first half of the 20th century,
  and finally U.S.  English in its second half) to acquire carbon copy
  transliterations of foreign terms."

It's a while since I passed my friends in highschool 'secret' notes in
a mixture of Cyrillic, Hebrew and Greek characters, so my Cyrillic is
too rusty to go to an on-line dictionary and dig up specific examples...

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
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