Rumours of Russian

When I arrived at the University of North Carolina, I got my first real opportunity to speak the European languages I was learning with native speakers. Students at the university came from many different countries. The Cosmopolitan Club, a group of foreign students and Americans who wanted to meet one another, gathered every Sunday afternoon in the activities building. I felt like a bee flitting from blossom to blossom until it is too heavy with pollen to fly or even buzz.

A rumour rippled across the campus in my senior year that seemed too good to be true. The university, it was whispered, was planning to start a class in Russian.

Sure enough, the rumour was soon confirmed. It was a historic event. Not only was the course the first in Russian ever offered by the University of North Carolina (or possibly by any university in the South), it also represented the first time the university had offered what one student called a "funny looking" language of any kind (he meant languages that don't use the Roman alphabet)!

The enrollment requirements were stiff. First you had to have completed at least two years in a "normal" language (Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese) with good grades. I qualified and was accepted.

For me the first day of Russian was a lot like the first day of school. I'd toyed with one funny looking language already (Chinese), but I knew Russian was a different kind of funny looking. Would I conquer it, as I had Spanish and Norwegian, or would Russian swallow me whole, as Latin had?

There were forty-five of us in that Russian class thinking varying versions of the same thing when the teacher, a rangy Alabaman named "Tiger" Titus, entered the room. After a formal "Good morning" he went straight to the front of the room and wrote the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on the blackboard.

You could feel the group's spirit sink notch by notch as each of Russian's "funny looking" letters appeared. Students were allowed under university rules to abandon a course and get themselves into another as long as they did it within three days after the beginning of the term. We had defections from Russian class in mid-alphabet. By the

time Tiger Titus turned around to face us, he had fewer students than had entered the room.

"My soul!" exclaimed one of the deserters when I caught up with him at the cafeteria later that day. "I've never seen anything like that Russian alphabet before in my life. Why, they've got v's that look like b's, n's that look like h's, u's that look like y's, is that look like p's, and p's that look like sawed off goal posts. They got a backwards n that's really an e and an x that sounds like you're gagging on a bone. They got a vowel that looks like the number sixty-one, a consonant that looks like a butterfly with its wings all the way out, and damned if they don't even have a B-flat!"

The next day there were no longer forty-five members of the university's first Russian class. There were five.

I was one of the intrepid who hung in.


	Rumours of Russian When I arrived at the University of North Carolina, I got my first real opportunity to speak the European languages I was learning with native speakers. Students at the university came from many different countries. The Cosmopolitan Club, a group of foreign students and Americans who wanted to meet one another, gathered every Sunday afternoon in the activities building. I felt like a bee flitting from blossom to blossom until it is too heavy with pollen to fly or even buzz. A rumour rippled across the campus in my senior year that seemed too good to be true. The university, it was whispered, was planning to start a class in Russian. Sure enough, the rumour was soon confirmed. It was a historic event. Not only was the course the first in Russian ever offered by the University of North Carolina (or possibly by any university in the South), it also represented the first time the university had offered what one student called a "funny looking" language of any kind (he meant languages that don't use the Roman alphabet)! The enrollment requirements were stiff. First you had to have completed at least two years in a "normal" language (Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese) with good grades. I qualified and was accepted. For me the first day of Russian was a lot like the first day of school. I'd toyed with one funny looking language already (Chinese), but I knew Russian was a different kind of funny looking. Would I conquer it, as I had Spanish and Norwegian, or would Russian swallow me whole, as Latin had? There were forty-five of us in that Russian class thinking varying versions of the same thing when the teacher, a rangy Alabaman named "Tiger" Titus, entered the room. After a formal "Good morning" he went straight to the front of the room and wrote the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on the blackboard. You could feel the group's spirit sink notch by notch as each of Russian's "funny looking" letters appeared. Students were allowed under university rules to abandon a course and get themselves into another as long as they did it within three days after the beginning of the term. We had defections from Russian class in mid-alphabet. By the time Tiger Titus turned around to face us, he had fewer students than had entered the room. "My soul!" exclaimed one of the deserters when I caught up with him at the cafeteria later that day. "I've never seen anything like that Russian alphabet before in my life. Why, they've got v's that look like b's, n's that look like h's, u's that look like y's, is that look like p's, and p's that look like sawed off goal posts. They got a backwards n that's really an e and an x that sounds like you're gagging on a bone. They got a vowel that looks like the number sixty-one, a consonant that looks like a butterfly with its wings all the way out, and damned if they don't even have a B-flat!" The next day there were no longer forty-five members of the university's first Russian class. There were five. I was one of the intrepid who hung in.