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As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit t
by throwaway71958 9y ago
As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- doktrin 9y agoJust seems like general obfuscation to me. It would be very weird for anyone to make assumptions about their identity based on broken english.
- mootothemax 9y agoWhile I get your wider point, I find the different types of mistakes that ESL'ers with different mother tongues make absolutely fascinating. I've noticed, say, that in Poland, where the native tongue lacks articles, people regularly mess up "the" and "a," or miss them altogether. I've never met a French person with the same issue, for obvious reasons. When I started looking into people's mistakes with tenses in English - dear god, so much about my native tongue that I had no idea about, and yet made particular nationality error combinations really stand out. It's crazy fun. Edit: and I love my eldest's progress with English. While she's basically a bilingual preschooler, she tends to speak English with polish word order: I like cars red. Her natural instinct is to also use the polish rules for nouns when choosing he/she/it. It's an absolutely fascinating process I feel privileged to observe.
- Pyxl101 9y ago> I like cars red Interestingly, that word order is also valid English, though it has a slightly different meaning than "I like red cars". Example: "I like [my] soup warm". "I like soup warm, but you can eat it cold and left over if you want." "I like having soup warm" "I like my cookies freshly baked" "I like men muscular and toned" "I like my women blonde, so you can go for the brunette" "I like cars red" doesn't quite work as well but doesn't seem wrong. Add a little context and it seems more normal. "As a buyer of many sports cars, I like my cars red, even despite the speeding tickets I get". Perhaps a linguist could explain how this phrasing works. (That said, of course I advocate teaching her to speak fluently and to use that word order only when she intends its subtlety of meaning.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- noobermin 9y agoI think it is a short hand slang for "I like cars painted red." or "I like cars colored red."
- FeepingCreature 9y agoI think it's short for "I like for cars to be red."
- Geee 9y agoI think this form puts the emphasis on "how?" instead of "what?". What do you want? - I want tea. How do you want your tea? - I want my tea hot with sugar.
- jwilk 9y agoNo, in Polish adjectives normally go before nouns, just like in English.
- Avenger42 9y agoI assumed he was facetiously referring to Reverse Polish Notation[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation
- wyldfire 9y agoNo, it seems to me more like Polish is actually one of his daughter's native languages.
- mootothemax 9y agoEhhhh... not often quite set in stone enough that you can rely on it, especially for spoken language. Emphasis and a whole host of other situations lean towards - but by no means demand - order in the example given.
- waitwait 9y agoAnother angle I haven't heard is that they are just having a bit of fun for the lulz: They know their adversaries can (fabricate) attribute with or without obfuscation (cyber war signalling style). So they bring it over the top with some cold war 80s action movie dialogue. It serves no other function than to taunt and confuse and hear some American housewives on Twitter go: I dunno, sounds Russian to me!
- mootothemax 9y agoBy halfway through I was kinda surprised they weren't going the full hog and throwing in a good Da, or Nyet, the people's... for full effect.
- waitwait 9y agoThe full effect seems to be a thread of 200+ comments talking about the language in the release, sentence-for-sentence, and many (un)witting agents pouring over the contents of the files. Perhaps, besides the fun of imagining someone having to explain to McCain what a "double dutch rudder" is, the language serves a higher purpose of increasing virality and impact.
- rdtsc 9y ago> It would be very weird for anyone to make assumptions about their identity based on broken english. They could be haven trying to disguise themselves, maybe fearing a grammatical analysis or somehow exposing some fingerprint in how they construct sentences. And as throwaway claimed, if you speak both English and Russian (I do), and have heard many others who speak both English and Russian for a many years you start to pick up patterns and understand when someone is speaking with a fake-make-it-sound-Russian style.
- kafkaesq 9y agoI'd be curious as to which particular "anti-mistakes" you had in mind (that you believe a non-native speaker wouldn't be likely to make). I have some hunches (like the over-use of linking verbs, and certain overly-idiomatic colocations), but I'd be curious as to what stands out in your view.
- throwaway71958 9y ago"The peoples" is unlikely. "-ing" after most verbs is unlikely. "the" is unlikely before "Freedom Caucus" and "NSC". There's no "the" in Russian, and ESL speakers often omit it, or put it where it doesn't really belong. The word "caucus" in itself is unlikely: I've never even heard of it before I moved to the US, it's not in common use abroad. "Whose" is unlikely. "To destroying" is very unlikely. "Will be happening" is unlikely ("will happen" is far more likely). "Be remembering" is very unlikely. "Do you be thinking" is very unlikely. And so on.
- hnaparst 9y agofascinating. To me, this linguistic analysis is much more interesting than the data dumps.
- kafkaesq 9y agoVery cool. Thanks for the data points.
- nyolfen 9y ago'freedom caucus' is a proper noun referring to an organization, they wouldn't need to know the meaning in order to use it. also you seem to ignore the possibility of using some machine translation assistance (eg for short phrases or sentences) which could account both for irregularities and correct verb conjugations.
- throwaway71958 9y agoTo this day I don't know what the word "caucus" would even correspond to in Russian. And English/Russian language pair is notoriously bad in machine translation systems. We're talking borderline unreadable, in either direction.
- ooqr 9y agoI'm pretty sure that was GP's point. The text is intentionally garbled with no identifiable first-language bias.
- ktta 9y agoNot really. The GP is implying that they are Russian with this >since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." But the person who replied is saying how the grammatical obfuscation doesn't look like something that's done by a Russian but by an English speaker who is trying to sound like a Russian with bad English. Because a Russian with bad English wouldn't make those mistakes.
- benwilber0 9y ago> I work for Russia ... does not imply it was done by a Russian.
- throwaway71958 9y agoTo my ear, this obfuscation sounds Middle Eastern, due to the frequent use of "-ing" in verbs whether it belongs there or not. I know an Iranian guy who does this a lot.
- diminoten 9y agoThe whole point is to feed it through translation services dozens of times until the meaning remains but the actual word selection is super poor and completely unidentifiable. It's weird to me that you're trying to push this to blame another group so quickly, especially with an 8 day old account.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 9y agoYes, that's what I do sometimes, using offline apps with local dictionaries.
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- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- samstave 9y agoCIA got it...
- hnaparst 9y agoIf you have a copy of the linguistic analysis written by Shlomo Argamon, please post it.
- hnaparst 9y agohttp://multaverba.blogspot.com/2017/04/initial-linguistic-analysis-of.html http://multaverba.blogspot.com/2017/04/initial-linguistic-an...
- snowwrestler 9y ago"Actually it's probably a false flag to make Russia look bad." - throwaway71958, created 8 days ago 2017 in a nutshell right there.
- 1337biz 9y agoFull circle irony: I find the argument of the dubious throwaway more beliveable than OP.
- coldtea 9y agoCount us both. The BS one hears today (against Russia, etc) are the "WMD"s of 2017. There's a single superpower the last 2+ decades (Russia is no USSR) and it has a long history of pushing for its "interests" all over the world, starting wars, grabbing resources, overthrowing governments, supporting all kinds of lunatics and dictators. And covering the whole damage they do with holier than though finger pointing, made up stories, and generally BS they serve a docile and mostly ignorant on anything happening outside their home state, much less worldwide, population. Or, actually, worse than ignorant: mostly informed from mainstream tv news presenting them the "enemy du jour", but with a complete lack of context and history, and with any nuance and details jumbled up in their minds (in a "Go to Austria, see the kangaroos" fashion). Whether its a Joe Sixpack or a college educated person, in the majority of cases they equally lack context and perspective, and have no real reason to even try to get one, since they have no skin in the game: some other poor suckers will go and fight (e.g. literally poor whites, blacks and latinos going into service) and some remote countries will pay the toll, so no big deal.
- astronautjones 9y ago100%
- wyldfire 9y agoI can't say I agree with all of the foreign policy decisions made on my behalf in the last few decades. But Russia reaps what it sows. And it sows corruption much worse than ours. Also it's remarkably unfair for you to cherry pick our foreign policy misdeeds while leaving out all of the good we've done over that same time frame. I wish we cultivated a better interest in world news and culture here. Our natural borders play some (small) role in our isolation. But, yes, the population at large also ignores much of the global news.
- bluecreator 9y agoThis text structure is from the poem "America" by Ginsberg. They're playing with it. Particularly first second third person stuff.
- bluecreator 9y agoHere's the link. It's a beautiful poem. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49305 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detai...
- bluecreator 9y agoThis text structure is from the poem "America" by Ginsberg. They're playing with it. Particularly first second third person stuff.
- int_19h 9y agoI'm also Russian, and I have to concur with this assessment after looking at the text (while noting that I do generally believe that Russian government was actively involved in cyberattacks against US, including, among other things, to affect election results last year). It does sound very much like a native or near-native English speaker trying to fake Russian accent.
- omonra 9y agoI have no opinion on the content, but as a bilingual English - Russian speaker i concur that this is likely a text written by an English speaker who tries to sound like a foreigner.
- zedred 9y agoCan you give us some examples?
- danieldk 9y agoDue to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. Or it is Russian and they intentionally formulated this as cartoonesque Russian, so that everyone says "this can't possibly be Russian, it's someone who tries to put the blame on Russia". The problem is that if this comes from a government power, it is likely that they have the resources to use some professional translators and/or linguists to make it look whatever they want it to look like. Anything here that is not backed by other data is just pure speculation.
- crimsoneer 9y agoQuite. If this was actually designed by a state actor, they have access to professional linguists who specialise in this sort of stuff. You're not going to figure out who it is unless they want you to, and it certainly won't be obvious enough for a cursory browse to identify provenance.
- NDlurker 9y agoWhy do people keep saying it's Russian or someone faking Russian? Clearly it was written to avoid identification by text analysis or whatever it's called.
- nthcolumn 9y agoPeople are assuming Russian or someone pretending to be Russian. For me the person is an Iranian living in the West possibly Europe.
- ender89 9y agoSure, but I'm betting that a russian backed attempt to sow chaos could hire someone capable of putting together a decent sentence in english. There could be all sorts of reasons for the broken sentence. Sentence structure can be a sort of fingerprint, I would probably run any message I had through google translate a few times until I had something which was still legible, but didn't sound like my writing. And that has the benefit of making it seem like a non-english speaker wrote the post, its all just misdirection.