Speaking in Tongues

Is this sentence correct?
"I may loudly pronounce a "thank you" to some ad hoc deity for the fact that I don't believe in bad Karma."

or should it be something along the lines "some ad hoc believed in deity" ?

Could someone tell me how the name of this school should be pronounced in English? (I can read IPA)

Thanks in advance.

I'm in Dnepropetrovsk and trying to learn Russian. The problem is, Ukranian is very similar to Russian, and I can't tell which language the television shows I'm watching are in, and I don't want to watch Ukranian programs and think I'm hearing Russian. I can usually tell which language something is written in - Ukranian uses the letter "i" with either one or two dots - but am at a loss for how to distinguish spoken Ukranian from Russian. Any suggestions?

And, is Euronews (cable channel 38…

I am translating about 50 very long captions on some Russian photographs from 1900-1910, and my brain has rebelled at this point.

One photo shows a building that housed the "Institute for Noble Maidens." Please, there must be a better way to describe it; it's where young women of the nobility were educated.

In World of Our Fathers , Iriving Howe describes the education of the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen at the City College of New York at the end of the 19th century:

Mommsen, Gibbon, and Green as a freshman, the classical French playwrights as a sophomore; the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle in his last two years

Mommsen is Theodor Mommsen, 19th century German historian of Rome, and Gibbon is Edward Gibbon, 18th century English author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Who's…

An interesting (and rather long) article about why the world uses the green running man exit sign and we keep our "EXIT" sign in the US. Part of a five-article series "The Secret Language of Signs: They're the most useful thing you pay no attention to. Start paying attention."

I finally decided to go through the thousands of coins I have collected on my travels over the years and sort them by country (I know I should get out more). I identified every one except this one here. The coin website has been a bit slow with responses but I know the combined wealth of knowledge on the SIT will have an answer.

I am not even sure of the language. Pretty sure it is not Thai as I first thought. Also pretty sure it's not arabic as suggested on the website. Looks like Hindi?

Listening to a piece for theremin and cello last night I started wondering about the name of the inventor, who went by Lev Sergeyevich Termen (Лев Сергеевич Термен) while in Russia and by Léon Theremin during his years in the US. Specifically I was wondering about how a Russian came to have a family name with an initial Th-.

Wikipedia tells me that the family was of French origin. Is Theremin or Théremin or anything like it a French family name? Is Термен a Russian family name?

(Off topic…

According to the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8542896.stm

"Very little English is spoken in Sochi, and even Russian sometimes poses a problem as many taxis are driven by immigrants from neighbouring Abkhazia"

This is nonsense (I did email the bbc but they ignored me). Russian is the lingua franca of Abkhazia. Abkhaz is spoekn by 20% of the population max, everyone speaks Russian fluently. I know becuase I've been there. The BBC's suggestion makes about as much sense as saying Welsh…

I'm reading LP Bolivia's latest guide from 2007 (and I double checked with the online guides here), and I found these quotes that left me wondering (bolding mine):

On La Paz -> Getting there and away -> Air

"El Alto International Airport (contact info) is 10km via toll-road from the city center on the Altiplano. At 4050m, it's the world's highest international airport; larger planes need 5km of runway to lift off (...)"

On Potosí -> Getting there and away -> Air

"Potosí boasts the world's…