Thoughts on a Sevastopol war memorial

[fivemack]

[Poll #1177990]

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I could find any of them on a map easily; just type the name of the town into the search bar, what's the problem?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It's the geography-lesson sense of 'find on a map': given a printout of something like this (http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=57.797944,35.683594&spn=29.801832,66.796875&t=p&z=4), locate X. If you prefer, 'have you an intuitive sense of roughly where Smolensk is?'

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I *did* know that's what you meant; which is why I did not check *any* of them (does "roughly" require 500-mile accuracy, or only 1000?).

[kaet.livejournal.com]

How should you have spelt Krepost Brest? Krepost Bresty? Krepost Brestj? They both look silly to me.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It's the soft-sign at the end of Krepost (ah, from context крепость is 'fortress' and this was a fortress that stood up to the Fascist assault particularly well) that I was having trouble representing: the monument didn't bother with a genitive ending

[simont]

I have heard of Minsk other than from Tom Lehrer

Yes, but only just: it's mentioned once in passing in Yes, Prime Minister. Furthermore, Novorossisk is a place I've only heard of from Tom Lehrer :-)

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

I did cheat a bit in interpreting "finding on a map" as "having a rough idea of where in the former USSR this town is located".

[redbird]

I'm good at reading maps and using indexes to atlases, so my answer to the second doesn't actually address already knowing where things are.

[redbird]

In the sense you mean, I'm confident of finding Leningrad, Moskva, Odessa, Minsk, Volgograd (in a pinch, start by finding the Volga), Kiev, and Murmansk.

[sraun]

I had a passion for Solzhenitsyn (hey, the spellchecker thinks I spelled that right!) when I was in high school - I heard of a lot of Russian cities there.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Several of these places I know only because I had a book on the Soviet chemical and biological weapons programme and they were marked on the little map with a biohazard symbol.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

We had a puzzle book called 'the chicken from Minsk'.

[naath.livejournal.com]

You should've spelled it St Petersburg.