Russian Word of the Day

The other day I came across an intriguing quote in a blog entry on Irish English:

Another interesting influence from Irish is its absolute lack of the words yes or no, so when our ancestors were speaking English as a second language, they would translate how they would use such words originally in Irish.

Although international English influences mean young people do this way less nowadays, a lot of us Irish still simply don’t use these words. In the Irish language (and in other languages like Thai for example), this issue is resolved by simply repeating the verb of the question. Can you swim? I can! Do you like tomato juice? I don’t. Are you coming? I amn’t.

Yes you read that right: amn’t. This is one I’m surprised other English speakers don’t use! You say isn’t, don’t, aren’t… It’s logical if you ask me!

The Russians can do precisely the same thing. Instead of answering yes to a yes-no question, they can simply repeat the verb. Instead of saying no, they repeat the verb with не in front of it. I generally prefer to translate this construction with phrases like do/don't , was/wasn't, have/haven't:

This phrases can be preceded by да and нет as well:

Sometimes this response can seem very curt, if not downright rude, to the American ear. I once had the following conversation with a woman passer-by in Russia:

At first I was offended. But then my ratiocination kicked in and I reminded my emotional self that Russian intonation that seems rude to the American ear is often perfectly polite in Russia, and that Russian grammatical constructions don't necessarily have the same emotional content as parallel English structures. I asked a couple Russian teachers about it and was told that for many speakers of Russian this standard response pattern is perfectly normal and doesn't imply irritation or hostility.

PS. I have never seen this verbal response pattern given an official name in the academic literature of Russian. I propose “bipolar verbal response pattern.” How's that for academese?

Let's say a first year Russian student wants to know how to say “paragraph.” He looks it up in the dictionary (and then does some reverse dictionary sleuthing) and finds that the word абзац means “indentation,” that bit of space that one leaves at the beginning of a paragraph before the first letter. Thus a paragraph that begins «с абзаца» “with an indentation” (lit. “from an indentation”) will look like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

From that meaning, the word абзац extends to mean the space between two such indents, in other words, a paragraph:

Another phrase for indentation is красная строка. Красная in this context has nothing to with the color red, but rather with the old fashioned meanings of красный, which sometimes had the sense of beautiful, special or honorable:

Having now studied twelve languages, I can tell you with complete confidence that none has profanity as astonishing as Russian profanity. Seriously. The creativity, eloquence and vile vigor of Russian cussing is simply mind-boggling. English profanity is like baby-talk compared to Russian. The word that names the system of Russian profanity is мат. Notice that there is no soft-sign at the end of the word. Despite the superficial resemblance to the word for mother, you must never use мат around your Russian мать. She will slap your face so fast, you won't know what hit you.

In the US you can often hear English curse words in casual conversations on the street. In Russia there is still a wide gap between people who regularly use мат and people who don't. Those who use it, use it like crazy. Most everybody else hardly ever uses it. Not too surprisingly, factory workers and peasants are more likely to use it than highly educated folks. I was much amused to read about an ice cream factory in Barnaul where the management got so tired of the workers' vulgarity that they issued an official dictionary to help the workers translate their normal curse-laden expressions into polite literary Russian. I can tell, dear reader, that you are consumed with curiosity about this dictionary, so a bit of it is reproduced below.

Warning! The material below contains offensive Russian and English profanity!

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Концерт is the Russian word for concert. In terms of declension it is a perfectly regular noun, but bear in mind that it is a на word: when you talk about going to or being at a concert, you must use the preposition на instead of в, and when returning from a concert you must use the preposition с:

The most common words for blouse in Russian are кофта and блузка. The former is a perfectly second-declension noun, and the latter is affected by a spelling rule and has a fill vowel in the genitive plural:

Some sample sentences:

Russian Wikipedia makes the following statement:

I suppose theoretically that might be the case, but nowadays кофта is used fairly generically for a woman's top in casual conversation and is essentially the same thing as блузка. (Do a quick search for the word on images.google.com if you don't believe me.)

Last week when I googled кофта, I came across a slightly vulgar Russian poem about a blouse that had me rolling on the floor laughing my academic credentials off. It suddenly struck me that it would be a great opportunity for a little translation practice… or better yet, a translation contest! I quickly threw together an English version just to be sure it could be done effectively: yes, it can. So here we go:

Translation contest and rules

• Translate the poem into English.
• E-mail it to me using the contact link at the bottom of this page.
• All entries received by 11:59 p.m. on May 28th, 2010 will be considered.
• I will send $10 by regular mail to the person who sent me the version I judge to be the best translation.
• People from all countries are welcome to apply as long as you have a postal address to which I can send the $10 if you win.
• All entries will be posted to the web the first week of June so readers can compare translation tactics.