in the company of crows and ravens by john m marzluff

General rule (works in Britain at least, and for rabbits and hares too): if you’re not sure if something’s a crow or a raven, it’s a crow (or, quite possibly, a rook). It’s not that difficult to tell the difference between carrion crows and ravens though. I suspect many (most?) English speakers know them only from stories, and they’re barely more real than unicorns, which in itself makes a big difference to how you think about them. I know ravens from walking in the Lake District and North Wales, where they tend to circle overhead, making the occasional ominous rattling sound and generally giving the impression they’re waiting for you to die, or at least become sufficiently incapacitated that they can make a start on you. I see crows out of my window most days, and while they are big and black there’s not much romanticism to be found there. I wouldn’t say ravens and crows aren’t distinguished much in anglophone culture – to me, at least, ravens have associations with wild places and with death while crows are just… crows. John is living in a Chukchi encampment of yarangas there isn’t a literal street for hundreds of miles around. Also, in chapter 17 of the Rytkheu I came across a perfect illustration of the fact (not easy to assimilate at first) that the Russian phrase на улице, literally ‘in the street,’ can also mean generally ‘outside, outdoors’: “Джон вышел на улицу”. So I thought I’d pass it along for those who might find it useful.

Not just to shoot, fish, dress, and speak like us… But why do you ask me about it?]Īnd it correctly added the stresses furthermore, when it came to “Чайки живут с чайками,” it wasn’t sure whether the noun forms were from чайка ‘seagull’ or чаёк ‘(a bit of) tea’ so it provided alternate stresses, a far better solution than picking the most likely, which might not be the one needed.

It looks good! I inserted a chunk of text from the Rytkheu novel I happened to have open in another tab: LH reader Mike Chisholm is a student of Russian, and he sent me a link to (“Add stress marks to Russian text”), saying he didn’t know “how accurate or reliable it is” I wrote back:

In the company of crows and ravens by john m marzluff