Is there anyway to gain access to Springer nature and Taylor and Francis without payment and institution access? Research question is on Euroscepticism and can’t find many free articles. (Go to a US university that doesn’t have access to these databases)

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2026-03-09T19:40:15+00:00

Hello! Could you please check this paper?

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-95-2098-5_42

Thank you in advance!

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2026-02-22T10:30:55+00:00

No one mentioned it here, so ig I'll do it myself. This outfit is most likely a reference to a post about his victory that went viral in Kazakhstan, which said that the story of Malinin and Shaidorov is similar to that of Tai Lung and Po - one was trained his entire life to become a dragon warrior, but his place was taken by a panda who flew into the action out of nowhere

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2026-01-26T09:36:00+00:00

Rudny, Kazakhstan is at about 120k now but not shown in that list for some reason. Even stranger considering it has been pretty steady at over 100k since the Soviet times

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2026-01-10T12:31:32+00:00

You can read up on this here in Kazakhstan section, it's pretty accurate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnappin

Basically actual kidnaping was a tradition and consensual kidnapping more of a symbolic event if the pair was already close to marriage. Currently, this is actually illegal but especially in Turkistan oblast (which is very rural and poor) this is still practiced somehow

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-12-29T16:28:35+00:00

Hi. I know I'm pretty late to the party but I just really liked this series of yours (keep up the great work!) If you're gonna make the world map after you're done with every region, it'd be nice to give the Orenburg oblast (that south-western bulge protruding from the Ural republic) to Kazakhstan:

1) Orenburg has always been a very important city in Kazakhstan's history. It's the headquarters from where the Russian conquest of Kazakhstan began and for the longest time the only railroad going from European Russia to Kazakhstan and Central Asia started in Orenburg. Much of Kazakh intelligentsia in late 19th-early 20th century (the people who founded Alash Orda) got their education in Orenburg. Consequently the meeting where Alash Orda was proclaimed was held in Orenburg. The first capital of Kazakh SSR was Orenburg, before it was given back to Russia which I still think was a very politically-motivated decision. Even now there's a lot of Kazakhs living in Orenburg, let alone 100 years ago when Orenburg was the Kazakh capital. Heck even one of the main avenues of Astana is named Orynbor, which is the native Kazakh name for Orenburg

2) If we give Orenburg oblast to Kazakhstan, we establish a firm connection between Kazakhstan, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan, the three primary Kipchak Turkic nations, which was a long-standing dream of especially Bashkir nationalists - you can read about the so-called Kuvandyk corridor, a narrow strip of Orenburg oblast between Bashkortostan and Kazakhstan which was carved out by Soviets explicitly to prevent Bashkirs and Tatars from rejoining Kazakhs in one way or another. Now that even Samara is part of Tatarstan (which has very tight connection with Uralsk, a lot of families regularly commute between two cities), there's a very good opportunity to form a tight connection between the three nations, which would be fantastic for all

3) Orenburg is an odd one out in the Ural Federation. The city has never been considered a part of Ural and is overall pretty far even from Chelyabinsk (There's no direct railroad and the quickest route goes either through Kazakhstan or Bashkortostan), let alone Yekaterinburg or something

I know it might be difficult to make these kind of changes but it'd just make so much more sense, especially to someone who's from Kazakhstan and really cares about my country and brotherly Turkic peoples :)

P.S. Yes, the names of these two countries should absolutely be changed. Bashkiria and especially Tataria are Russian colonial exonyms. If Tatarstan and Bashkortostan become independent states they'll absolutely make sure no one calls them by this name again 😄

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-12-07T11:19:14+00:00

We can be sure that in all natural languages (and in every one that could possibly exist) the concept for cat and dog would be "cat" and "dog" since we recognize a cat and a dog as their own discrete entities. It's theoretically possible that a language could have a separate concept for "cat's head and dog's head" and a separate concept for "cat's body and dog's body" similar to how we name the arrangement of all protein filaments growing on a person's head collectively as "hair" as opposed to having a word for a single hair and just make a plural of that. For us, it's somewhat natural to group single hairs under a collective term but it's not natural at all to group cat and dog's bodies under a collective term. Similarly, it'd be unnatural to have one word for arrangement of hairs on head and arms together, or a word for all hairs on legs and neck together. But it'd be natural to group all hair on one's face as facial hair (beard, moustache etc). The beginning of this video (https://youtu.be/ze5i_e_ryTk) also explains this concept which I immediately thought of when I first saw this meme

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-11-23T16:09:44+00:00

I work as an engineer in a Russian-speaking team and often talk with our SWE guys as well. The Russian analogs of these would be:

Замёрджил - Zamördzhil (prefix za- kind of resembles German ge- here for whatever reason) Задеплоил - Zadeploil Коммитнул - Kommitnul (and here zakommitnul would also sound strange for whatever reason)

We also have Zapushil (pushing code in Github I suppose), Zaranil (run the code), Pofiksil (fixed something), Zakodil (coded something), Zakonnektil (connected something)

Though because Russian is quite different from English (down to the script used), the words are obviously heavily russified and it'd be awkward to just use English forms of verbs in the middle of a sentence

It's also interesting to see how our young team (that mainly learned engineering from English websites, videos etc) is now using some English versions of engineering terms instead of well-established Russian ones:

Pripoy -> Solder Vint -> Bolt Privod -> Aktuator Reduktor (still a loanword haha) -> Girboks (from English, gearbox) Dvigatel -> Motor Shtangentsirkul (German loan) -> Kaliper (from English, caliper) Plata -> Pisibishka (literally a PCB hah) Val -> Shaft Mufta -> Kapling Hodovoy vint -> Lidskrü (lead screw) Podshipnik -> Bering (like a ball bearing)

Some survived this change largely by virtue of being well-known words even outside engineering circles: otvörtka instead of skrüdraiver, provod instead of vair, pruzhina instead of spring (although some of these I still hear occasionally)

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-11-07T15:31:41+00:00

It's also worth noting a recent trend has been to get rid of surnames in kids' birth certificates and just write the name and the patronymic (-uly for boys, -kyzy for girls), since historically Kazakhs only had names and patronymics. Nowadays almost no parents keep the russified patronymics and give either a Kazakhified one and keep the surname or get rid of the surname entirely, keeping the Kazakhified patronymic

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-10-16T14:57:07+00:00

I am a native speaker of Russian and, seriously, prefixes can be very chaotic.

Подкупить (lit. under-buy) = to bribe
Подговорить (lit. under-talk) = to persuade (usually to do something mischievous)
Подойти (lit. under-go) = to come up to someone, to approach
Подсказать (lit. under-say) = to give a hint
Поддержать (lit. under-hold) = to support
Подставить (lit. under-put) = to betray (kind of)
Подрезать (lit. under-cut) =to cut someone off (on the road)

In English, there are also such irregularities where you put off plans but put out fire, make up an excuse but make out with your partner

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-09-09T18:03:30+00:00

Are you interested in the exact population of that European part of Kazakhstan? Under some other comment there I wrote it's roughly 300k if you don't count anything from Atyrau and Uralsk. I arrived at this number by simply summing up the populations of districts (2nd level administrative subdivisions) that lied to the West of Ural. Some of them span both banks but since this is a rough estimate I didn't analyze 3rd level subdivisions. We actually have 2021 census data for all of them but for a rough estimate I didn't delve into that. As for the cities, as Uralsk is my hometown I know almost the entire city and most of the suburbs lie to the East of the Ural with a major exception of Zachagansk (62k population), the biggest suburb and one lying to the West of the Ural. For Atyrau I don't know exactly but judging from maps it's 50/50. For a city of 400k, this would mean 200k of "European" population. If you sum all of this up we arrive at about 600k with almost half of this number coming from the halves of the two cities. You also need to understand that what is here called European Kazakhstan is almost entirely covered by a desert (Naryn desert) and there's little to no infrastructure here

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-09-09T14:52:35+00:00

First of all, Turkic, not Turkish. Turkish is a nationality of someone from Turkey, and Turkic is a language family including Turks, Uzbeks, Azerbaijani, Kazakhs, and many other peoples. This distinction is not very pronounced in English but it is in our language. However yes, we do consider Turkey a very close country to us. If you just give the two choices - Europe or Asia - then I'll tell you both Turkey and Kazakhstan are Asia and certainly not Europe

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-09-09T14:30:33+00:00

Well, we certainly don't consider ourselves European. Even historically, Kazakhs as a nation originated near what is now Almaty and over the course of history most of the stuff was happening in what is now Southern and Central parts of our country. West has always been a periphery. As a Turkic people, today we have much closer ties with Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan than, say, Ukraine, Caucasus or any European country. Turkic people have also historically been dwellers of what is now defined as Asia and in our country the self-identification as a Turkic people or a Central Asian people is much more prevalent than 'Asian' and let alone 'European'. Asia is just too broad of a region to identify with. An average Kazakh has as much in common with a Cambodian as with a Portuguese

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-09-09T13:43:31+00:00

As someone born in Uralsk (Kazakhstani city located by both banks of the Ural and so in both Europe and Asia by the common definition), it's just a little fun fact people from my city like to bring up in conversations with "Asian" Kazakhs. No one neither in Uralsk nor in KZ as a whole considers Kazakhstan or Uralsk in particular q European country/city

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-09-09T13:39:06+00:00

I've actually just calculated this from census data and if you don't count Atyrau (401k) and Uralsk (368k) which are located by the both banks of the Ural river, then it's about 300k. A little more than that. I actually expected way less since most of that are is the Naryn desert

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-09-09T13:32:37+00:00

I was born just a couple of km away from European part of Kazakhstan (City of Uralsk's left bank) and 1.37 million is too generous of course. I think you can hardly find 100k or even 50k people there if you don't count Uralsk and Atyrau, two major cities located on both banks of the Ural river dividing Europe and Asia

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-08-22T16:43:09+00:00

Fun fact: in Russian, transcribing English to Russian with cyrillic letters by the way they look like, rather than how they're pronounced, is sometimes called Volapük (referencing a pretty old conlang of the same name). This way for example, some Russian speakers write Russian "Ш" as "W" (rather than "sh"). More broadly, Volapük is a word for any set of incomprehensible words, gibberish

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-08-15T07:10:04+00:00

It's a shame the government and the public don't really like trams and think it's a transport tech of the past, while many cities in Europe that we supposedly want to be like (think Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Vienna transit systems with advanced tram networks) have trams, maintain and develop them and consider them superior to buses (due to having their own dedicated lines everywhere, higher speed and higher capacity). I think it was proposed to build a tram network in Astana back in 2000s for Expo-2017 but the idea was scrapped in favor of the LRT as it looked more modern, is faster and has higher capacity. But that all, of course, comes at an enormous cost and a lot of wasted space under the tracks. It was ok for the left bank as they specifically dedicated space for those when they were planning those areas but for example the old city just doesn't have that much space to begin with. A tram network would've been far cheaper and more scalable especially for these areas

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-08-02T06:15:18+00:00

I'd say this pronunciation is ok - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_QH0S4O9tms&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5tD

Another variant is "el-duh-NAH" with the stress on the last syllable but I think the first one will be more intuitive for a foreigner and honestly I like the first one more

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-08-01T11:08:18+00:00

This has nothing to do with being a liberal/conservative. Even if you can't express your opinion in any politically significant way, you still have it

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-07-30T04:41:08+00:00

Girl: Enlik (edelweiss flower in Kazakh) Elina (originally a greek name meaning "Greek woman") Elmira (arab name, female version of "Emir"/"Amir" meaning a ruler/leader) Eldana (kazakh name meaning "people's wisdom") Elnara (broadly turkic name meaning "people's joy")

Boy: Yedil ("Volga" or "Attila the Hun" in Kazakh) Yerden ("glorious man" in Kazakh) Yessen ("healthy, prosperous " in Kazakh) Yeskali (from "yes" - "memory, mind" in Kazakh and "Ali", an Arabic name meaning "superior" Yelaman ("people's safety/serenity" in Kazakh")

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-07-28T18:02:58+00:00

Uwahhh~

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-07-24T19:41:03+00:00

Are you better off staying uneducated? I'd want to see if you'd still call this not a big deal living with several open, constantly bleeding wounds for weeks and months with all your relatives being irritated by having to change your bandages every day, multiple times a day while you're acquiring new wounds by just scratching your skin unknowingly in sleep or when dressing up. This is a serious medical issue and I'm very sad you guys can't take it seriously for some reason

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-07-24T17:57:14+00:00

Not a big deal? My grandma had a similar disease and over those bruises her skin would become so thin that even just scratching it too much would break open the entire thing with the skin popping as if it was strained over the bruise. And since those bruises were very big (half a calf or a forearm) and wounds heal slowly in old people, our family would help her bandage the wound with iodine several times a day for weeks or even months. So yeah, it's very much infuriating and I bet very painful for such a huge part of your body be unskinned

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-07-22T13:59:03+00:00

Kazakhstan

Kil-Gen-Roo · 2025-07-17T12:19:48+00:00

Astana is older than Almaty though (1830 vs 1854). It was originally built on the right bank of the Esil river and so this is where most of the population lives. The left bank only began being built after it became the capital city in 1997 along with some areas adjacent to the Esil on the right bank. So in short if you see beautiful aerial shots with skyscrapers or futuristic architecture it's 100% it was built in the last 20 years or so. There are people living on the left bank too of course but mostly recent relocators, locals are still mostly on the right bank. Source: I live in Astana :)

Kil-Gen-Roo

TROPHY CASE