Russian Word of the Day

The most essential sauce of western cookery is doubtless mayonnaise, which in Russian is майонез. It is a perfectly regular noun, so it's declension causes no difficulty.

Although the Russians' love of alcohol is legendary, and their love of sour cream is nearly obsessive, their passion for mayonnaise is equally astonishing. For instance, I was at a cafe this morning and ordered manty, which are kind of like enormous ravioli. Doubtless hearing a bit of an accent in my voice, the cashier asked whether I wanted ketchup or mayo with them. Well, duh, I know the answer to that one: we are in Russia so it has to be mayo! Here's a picture of the manty. Note the quantity of mayo on them:

The Russians also garnish soups with a dollop of mayo:

If you mix mayo with 100 grams of any vegetable matter, then they call it a salad. One of the most famous Russian salads is called «сельдь под шубой» "herring under a fur coat," which when you first look at it seems to have little mayo:

Let's examine the recipe. We start with the ingredients:

• 300 g herring, shredded
• 300 g grated, boiled potato
• 300 g grated, boiled carrot
• 300 g grated, boiled beets
• 300 g grated apple
• 150 g grated
• mayo

Now the procedure:

1. Place the potatoes on a serving dish. Even them out. Cover with mayo.
2. Put the herring on top. Cover with mayo.
3. Put the onion on top.
4. Put the carrots on top of the onions. Cover with mayo.
5. Put the apples on the carrots. Cover with mayo.
6. Cover with beets. Even the layer out.
7. Garnish with mayo.

To the American palate this quantity of mayonnaise is simply grotesque. We immediately think of the clogging of our carotid arteries and our inability to have six-pack abs or a shapely waistline. But this is perfectly normal for a Russian dish. And truth to tell, once we get past our cultural knee-jerk reaction, it tastes just fine. So here are some sample sentences:

Note: the н is pronounced hard in this word, thus [маянэз].

In our first years of learning Russian we spend a lot of time learning conjugation and declension, trying to figure out how to weave sentences together with subjects and direct objects and prepositional phrases. It's an amazing grammatical dance that has its own beauty, though perhaps it takes ten years before one really sees the beauty part... Anyhoo, so you take your first trip to Russia, and you are braced to collide with strange cases and unreal conditional clauses and sentences that last longer than Kafka's, and then you are stunned to learn that it's the really short sentences with nothing but the nominative case that entirely floor you.

For instance, yesterday morning I was in my currently favorite eating place, and I heard the following conversation:

I can pretty well guarantee you that right now first- and second-year readers are thinking "What the heck?" The conversation is between a woman customer (blue lines) and the cashier (yellow lines). Spend a minute or two to see if you can figure out what the heck they are talking about, then click 'read more' for a line-by-line explanation.

Read more »

One of the words I love in Russian is дно, which means bottom in the sense of the bottom of a glass or the bottom of the ocean or the bottom of a barrell. I love it because words just don't start with 'dn' in English, so it's a complete shock when students first encounter it. We English speakers want to put a vowel between the д and the н, but the Russians don't do that at all. Insteaad they start making the д sound, and the air that builds up in the mouth behind the tongue is released through the nose. The singular of the word is perfectly regular, but it has an irregular plural:

The place American students of Russian are most likely to first encounter this word is when they go to Russia for their first study-abroad program. The first week of class they diligently do their homework every day, and then Friday night rolls around and their new Russian friends invite them home for dinner and vodka, and once the vodka starts flowing they learn the phrase «до дна» "to the bottom," which essentially means their buddies don't want them to sip the vodka like a sensible human being, but to do the shot all at once and then follow it with beer, wine, or more vodka. Thus «до дна» is about the equivalent of the phrase "bottoms up" in English. (And of course in the morning the students wake up with похмелье and swear they will never drink again, which of course doesn't work because they are in Russia. To really refuse alcohol in Russia you need a nice solid religious mooring, so I recommend that all my readers immediately become Baptists.)

But of course the word has a thousand other uses that have nothing to do with alcohol:

One of the verbs I really like in Russian is разбираться. It has several meanings, but the one I have in mind today is the equvialent of "to have insight into, to understand". In this sense the verb is only used in the imperfective. For instance,

As an imperfective/perfective pair the verb can mean "to sort out the details, to figure out what's going on, to clarify the situation":

Here is the conjugation of the verb for your convenience:

Notes: "House" is amazingly popular in Russia. Everyone I talk to here has watched it.

The conversation about пельмени is based on one I had at the Чеховский рынок in Казань. The woman who ran the pelmeni stand was particular gracious and willing to have an extended conversation with a foreigner. It was she who introduced me to хинкали. She was selling mass-produced ones that were very good. I think regular khinkali actually have thinner dough. See this Wikipedia article for a picture.

Sometimes a word just sounds so funny that you laugh out loud the first time you hear it, and one of those words for me was фрикаделька, which means meatball. Why is it funny? I suppose it reminds me of words like roley-poley or higgledy-piggledy. In fact when I first heard it, I was sure it must have come from some kind of child's poem. I was wrong. Fasmer says that it was borrowed from German Frikadelle or French fricadelle, which originally came from Italian frittadella, meaning "fried in a pan." Despite the fact that the word in Italian meant 'fried,' фрикадельки in Russia aren't fried in a pan, but rather boiled in some kind of broth. Here's how it declines:

Although you usually encounter the word in the plural, it is also possible to find it in the singular. There is also a non-diminutive form фрикадель, although I haven't heard it in common speech.

Фрикадельки can be made of the flesh of pretty well any animal. When you are specifying what kind of meatballs they are, usually you use the preposition из followed by the genitive case of the type of meat. The four types I have encountered most often this summer are listed below. (I'll explain why I added Google hits in a moment.)

Sometimes you also hear the word фрикадельки preceded by an adjective to indicate the type of meat. I was curious which construction was more common, so I ran a Google hit comparison (2010-07-18) to determine that. Making grammatical judgments by a Google hit count is not a reliable way to understand the intricacies of grammar, but for what it's worth, it looks like the «из» construction is more common than the adjectival construction:

My favorite фрикадельки at the moment are the курино-говяжьи фрикадельки 'chicken and beef meatballs' served at the Трали-Вали dining room at ТГГПУ. Oddly enough, I don't get any hits on that phrase at all on Google, so perhaps they are a newer type of фрикадельки.

Here are some sample sentences with the word фрикадельки: