an interesting video got uploaded to a nostalgia group on facebook which showed an old (date unknown) tv ad on state television for Astra razor blades, i uploaded it to youtube and added English subtitles (turn CC on for it to appear on screen) for y'all's viewing pleasure!
Astra superior vintage TV Advert
- Thread starter Itzflame002
- Start date
That was fun to watch, thank you for sharing.
The interesting thing about this is that it says, "The 4 numbers on each corner of the blade mean that this blade is 4 excellent blades in one." So, they seem to indicate that the numbers are to keep track of blade edge/sides while using instead of quality control purposes.
They don't make them like that anymore.
WONDERFUL!! Thanks for sharing. 
Curious how Soviet consumer products would often use the English alphabet, rather than Cyrillic, isn't it?
I think that may be a Czech advert selling the original Astra SS blades
Czech may be closer to more 'Western European' languages, I believe it has some German influences, so that may account for it. It uses Latin Script I think.
Languages are not my strong point though, nor is much else.
One of the Eastern Bloc Slim clones appears to be being used too.
Last edited:
I listened closely, but it was not a language I've encountered before. I had a few quarters of Russian at Ohio State. Now mostly useless, except I have a knack for spotting Russians online who are trying to pose as Americans complaining about this, that, and the other.
I compliment their English with Google Translate Russian replies...
But my thinking was that Astras from that era were still made in Leningrad. And the English spelling on the blades is therefore curious.
I compliment their English with Google Translate Russian replies...
But my thinking was that Astras from that era were still made in Leningrad. And the English spelling on the blades is therefore curious.
At about 6-7 seconds, it looks like Arabic on the screen. I work with several Arabic speakers but the ad doesn't sound quite the same. Maybe it is just the woman's voice, but it sounds more Asian to me.
It didn't sound Russian to me, though it's been a few years since I've been there. I thought perhaps arabic as well.
- Thread starter
- #11
I
It is in fact Arabic, i thought it'd be a given since I've linked JRTV, Which is Jordanian state television, Jordan Is an Arabic speaking country.
- Thread starter
- #12
It is in fact Arabic, it aired on JRTV, Jordan's state television. Jordan is an Arabic speaking country.
Yes, how remarkably unperceptive of me. I think it may be that I'm not used to hearing a woman speaking Arabic.
That and the Jordanian crown in the upper right corner!
Perhaps I'd had a few drinks..
I didn't click on the link. I see now.
At my work, one person is from Jordan and one from Lebanon. Both speak Arabic but the dialect is different so there is difficulty with them understanding each other. It's very amazing to me how they basically swap between Arabic and English mid-sentence.
My battalion had an Arabic-speaker (his parents were Egyptian) with us in Iraq. He was with my platoon on one mission I remember, and he was chatting up a contingent of Iraqi soldiers who were with us that day. Didn't seem to be as big a gap in understanding there.
We were all told not to talk up the fact we had a bi-lingual American soldier with us, as he would be snatched up by Brigade or higher to be a driver or office rogue if word got out!
It's probably not that much different than someone from Boston talking to someone from south Louisiana.
Correct.
Until very recently, Astra were still made in Leningrad, and the blades still have English spelling.
That's called code switching, and it's very common for bilingual people. Sometimes they'll switch languages mid-sentence, but other times they'll just throw in a word or phrase from the other language if that's what comes to mind most easily or if there isn't a decent equivalent in the first language. Happens all the time.
Almost all the vocabulary would be identical between Boston and south Louisiana. The main difference would just be accent. They aren't truly different dialects. That's not necessarily true of other languages, where many of the actual words, forms, and/or grammar are different from one place to another.
It's one of mine.
Well, to be honest I grew up in New York and now I live in North Carolina, and there are some country folk that are...well... difficult to understand.
Otherwise, my mother-in-law grew up in Germany and has some trouble understanding German speaking people from other areas.
Several years ago I worked with a man from Thailand (*I think!*) and a Mexican. Both of them spoke broken-but-mostly-understandable English, but I had trouble from time to time. The funny thing was that they could converse in broken English all day.
Yes, but most of that is accent, I'm sure. If you could write down the words they're saying, I'm sure you'd understand 95% of it.
There are some notable differences in regional German. "Low German" and "High German" are quite different, and Swabian is on another level.
Does not surprise me. I once found myself eating dinner in France with the following group of people:
1. homeowner, spoke French and broken German
2. my grandfather, spoke English and broken German
3. homeowner's son, spoke French and textbook German
4. my father, spoke English and textbook German
5. my mother, spoke English and textbook Spanish
6. me, spoke English and textbook Spanish
My grandfather and the homeowner (his sweetheart from WW2) could understand each other's pig-German. Her son and my father could understand each other's textbook German. Our Spanish was useless.
A couple of years later, my grandfather was invited to speak on German television for the anniversary of the town's liberation. He spoke "German" on the air, upon which the host sitting next to him translated what he said into real German.
I speak a lot more than just textbook Spanish nowadays, and I can get by just fine in Mexico. (I've been to the interior of Mexico somewhere around 13 times and have been leading church mission trips there since 2009.) I do not code-switch when speaking Spanish, but rather think and therefore speak in only one language at a time. But people who are quite fluent in two languages don't necessarily have to think in either one while they're speaking it, so they can shift between them more naturally.
Well, I'm not particularly well versed or world traveled, but if I'm in a restaurant, I can order a beer in Spanish or German.
Otherwise, I took two years of French in high school, which I promptly forgot the day after graduation.
Similar threads
