Russian Word of the Day

The verb pair слушать/послушать means “to listen,” and it is completely regular in its formation:

In English the verb takes an object after the preposition “to,” but in Russian the thing you listen to appears in the accusative case with no preposition preceding it; that is, the verb takes a direct object:

The verb sometimes has the meaning “to obey,” just as the English verb also carries that shade of meaning:

Sometimes the verb is best translated “to attend” when a lecture or concert is involved:

There are also several stock phrases that make use of this verb, the most common of which is the telephone greeting «Слушаю!» or «Слушаю вас!», both of which are best translated as “Hello.” Last but not least is «Слушайте внимательно!» “Listen attentively!” This is a phrase used by every teacher in every Russian classroom when they want the children's attention.

A small restaurant where they sell кофе is called кофейня, and its genitive plural is кофеен. Doubtless the most well known coffee trademark is Starbucks, and sure enough you can even find their shops in Russia nowadays. Here's a sign from one of their outlets:

The sign reads: “The espresso you find in each Starbucks latte and cappucino is 100% responsibly grown and fairly traded.”

If you are up for a challenge, here are two linguistic tasks for you:

1. You will notice the English translation does not match word for word with the Russian original. See if you can come up with a translation that matches the original more closely word for word and yet still sounds good in English.
2. You will notice that the word еспрессо ends in an -о but shows masculine adjectival agreement. Present a hypothesis as to why that is.

Post your translations and hypotheses to the blog using the comment links.

The Russian word for coffee is кофе. It's an indeclinable noun, which means it never changes its ending for case or number. Despite the ending, it's a masculine noun, not a neuter one. In other words, one is supposed to say чёрный кофе, not чёрное кофе. There is a reason for that: the word used to be кофей, which is clearly masculine. In fact, if you read Crime and Punishment in Russian, you will still find it spelled that way.

You know how in English data is supposed to be plural, but everyone uses it as a singular form? That is, we are supposed to say “These data are interesting,” but in fact we usually say “This data is interesting”? The Russians are in a similar situation with the word кофе. Theoretically it's masculine, but it's incredibly common to hear it as a neuter. The error is so widespread that it has spawned a well-known joke:

The last line is funny because in that context a Russian will say одна булочка; thus the foreigner accidentally got the grammatically tricky point right, but then he slaughtered the Russian language by making a mistake that no native speaker, not even the least educated, would ever make.

This joke is retold all over Russia in a thousand variations where the customer changes: often he's a Georgian because the Georgian accent is well known and commonly mocked, sometimes a Russian, sometimes a foreigner, and the jokes are sometimes written with funky Russian spelling to portray his non-Russian accent.

Update 2009-09-02: As of yesterday a decree of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science went into effect that affirms several dictionaries as normative for Russian as the official language of the Russian government. Those dictionaries acknowledge that кофе can be treated as neuter, so in a sense it is now officially acceptable to say чёрное кофе. The dictionaries include:

• "Орфографический словарь русского языка" Б.Букчиной, И.Сазоновой и Л.Чельцовой
• "Грамматический словарь русского языка" под редакцией А.Зализняка
• "Словарь ударений русского языка" И.Резниченко
• "Большой фразеологический словарь русского языка" с комментарием В.Телия

In Soviet Union лёгкая про­мышленность “light industry,” including парфюмерная про­мышленность “perfume industry,” were not developed at all, as many might know. But every woman wants to be beautiful, in any country or place. So, how did the Soviet women go about it? Well, the lucky ones could get Polish make-up, which is of highest quality (at least, was ). Polish make-up and skin care was easy to get in Moscow or Saint-Peterburg, not in the rest of Russia. So a lot of times ladies relied on nature's gifts. For example, beets were used for rouge and lipstick sometimes! Raw or boiled beats, and their color looked natural and pretty, like the color of your own cheeks. For eyeliner sometimes mashed coal was applied with a sharpened end of a match, and boiled onion skins (отвар из шелухи лука) were used to dye hair. Also skin creams were made at home often, with herbs, flowers, honey, berries, fruits, etc. Календула marigold was used to clean the face, then tonic из ромашки “made from chamomile” was applied, and then home made creams, from ромашка chamomile, жень-шень ginseng, rose petals or petals of other flowers, etc. Маски из тёртого огурца и клубники “masks made of ground cucumber and strawberries” were very popular; they made the skin bright and translucent. Faces looked pretty, but very natural, as if no make-up was applied at all.

The only thing that was hard to get from nature was тушь mascara. The most popular one in Soviet Union (maybe, even the only one made within the country) was from Saint-Petersburg's perfume factory. It was a little brick, of very hard consistency, which needed water to make it soft and applicable to eyelashes. Ресницы выглядели слипшимися от такой туши! But of all Soviet women's dreams, French mascara was beyond the wildest imagination of average Soviet woman; only privileged wives of government officials, and some artists who traveled abroad, could get this luxury, as well as French parfum (французские духи), which is considered the best in the world in Russia, even to this day.

In my wildest dreams I could not imagine, growing up in Soviet Union, that one day I'd have all these unimaginable things among my possessions, French mascara, French perfume, all the good make-up! But something else I understood also. Some places women have all these wonderful make-up things, but still… something's missing. What is it? I understood that amount of beauty does not equal to quantities of make-up available… what is it then, the secret behind being beautiful? Genes? Good taste? The ability to make make-up “play” on your face? Or is it only inner beauty that shines through and beautifies the outside? Any opinions?

Every once in a while when you have mastered some grammatical backflip, you discover that one is not enough: you have to do a grammatical double gainer. This is the case to say that someone “doesn't have” something or that “there isn't” something somewhere.

You recall that when a person has something, in Russian we express by saying “At so-and-so is such-and-such.” The person shows up in the genitive case as the object of the preposition у, and the thing the person has shows up in the nominative case, and the “there is/are” is expressed by the word есть:

When the person doesn't have something, the “doesn't have” idea is expressed in the present tense by нет, and the thing he doesn't have shows up in the genitive case.

The past tense of нет is always не было, and the future tense is не будет. Notice the contrast between these sentences. In the “have” sentences, the verb changes according to the gender/number of the subject. In the “doesn't have” sentences, the verb does not change for the subject because there is no grammatical subject (that is, nothing in the nominative case), and the verb defaults to neuter singular form:

These tricks also apply to sentences expressing sentences with the idea of “there is no” or “there was no”:

Every once in a while when you are studying a foreign language, you have to learn to do some grammatical contortion and say something in a way that seems bizarre in contrast to your native language. For us English speakers, learning how to say “have” in Russian is one of those.

In an English sentence like “John has a book.” John is the subject of the sentence. The thing that he has is the direct object. To communicate the same idea in Russian, you have to rephrase the sentence as “At John there is a book.” Specifically, when a person has something, the person shows up in the genitive case as the object of the preposition у, and the thing the person has shows up in the nominative case, and the “there is/are” is expressed by the word есть.

Есть is the present tense form of the verb быть, so if you want to put those sentences in the past or future, you use the past and future forms of быть to say “At John there was a book” and “At John there will be a book.”

When an organization (as opposed to a person) has something, then instead of using the preposition у, the prepositions в and на are used with the prepositional case. Thus “The university will have/has/had a dormitory” comes out:

“The post office will have/has/had a fax machine” comes out:

Actually these sentences can be translated two different ways. «На почте есть факс» can be translated either “The post-office has a fax machine” or “There is a fax machine at the post office.” If these types of sentences use prepositions other than у-в-на, usually “have” is not the best translation:

The verb быть is also used in sentences with predicate adjectives. You may recall that in copular sentences (“to be” type sentences), the subject is the thing you are talking about. The predicate is everything else:

There are two types of adjectives in Russian: long form adjectives, which are the vast majority of adjectives, and short form adjectives.

An adjective that is in the predicate is, not surprisingly, called a predicate adjective. Long form predicate adjectives in Russian normally occur in the instrumental case. The only exception is when it is directly a part of a present tense is/am/are phrase, in which case the predicate is in the nominative case:

A short form adjective in the predicate will always be in the nominative case:

Of course feminine, neuter, and plural forms are also possible:

The verb быть is also used in sentences with predicate nouns. What is a predicate? In copular sentences (“to be” type sentences), the subject is the thing you are talking about. The predicate is everything else:

In Russian the most common verb for the “to be” concept is быть. It is imperfective in terms of meaning, but it is unique in that it is the only imperfective verb to have a simple future form:

Although быть has the present tense third person singular form есть and the present tense third person plural form суть, these are used only in specialized contexts. They aren't normally used to say things like “She is pretty” or “He was in Zvenigorod.” Instead you just leave the verb out in the present tense. Examples:

In English we have several words for a person who likes to go to bed early and get up early: morning person, early riser, early bird. People who like to go to bed late and get up late are night people or night owls. If you go to a Russian dating service like http://russianwives4u.net or http://russianstuds4u.net (not that I myself have ever been to such a site), you may find that you have to specify whether you are an early bird or a night owl. The Russian equivalent of an early bird is жаворонок, literally a skylark, and the Russian equivalent of a night owl is сова, literally an owl. So you can fill out those parts of your dating profile like this:

I have never had a conversation in Russia about Scottish music, so I have never actually heard a Russian use the Russian word for bagpipe, which is волынка. Imagine my surprise when I came across a Russian website dedicated to bagpipes. The only thing I could think of that would be stranger would be an American website devoted to сало. Sample sentences:

Last Saturday I was at a concert starring the famous Bulgarian musician Theodosii Spassov, and to my great surprise right in the middle of his band was a guy playing the bagpipe. Who knew the Bulgarians had bagpipes? And about an eighth of the time he played the bagpipe while standing on one leg, drawing the other up either to practice yoga or support the bag. If you have any idea why a piper stands on one leg while piping, please let me know in the comment section.

It turns out that the Turks also have bagpipes, which they call tulum. The Czechs have bagpipes. The Spanish and Galicians have bagpipes. The Hungarians have bagpipes. The Italians have bagpipes. Even the Poles have bagpipes! What's even odder is that the Poles have nearly half a dozen words for the instrument, depending just where you are in Poland.

Used by permission of Артемий Лебедев

One other verb that is used to express “to ask” is задавать/задать, literally “to pose.” It is used in conjunction with the noun вопрос, which means question. It is conjugated like this:

The verb combines with the noun вопрос in the accusative case, and the person being queried shows up in the dative case:

The quote by Berkeley is not very well known in Russia and does not yet have a generally accepted translation. It is so well known in the US that it spawns regular parodies, the most famous of which is “If a man speaks in the forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?” That one has become so iconic that it is reproduced on t-shirts regularly.

Note: the stress on the perfective past tense forms sometimes varies from the stress here indicated.

The verb pair спрашивать/спросить means “to ask” in the sense of “to ask (a question).” It never means “to ask someone for something.” It is conjugated like this:

The person who is asked the question shows up in the accusative case. The question that is asked most commonly shows up as indirect speech in a separate clause introduced by a comma:

But of course the question clause may also contain direct speech:

The verb is also used if a person answers the phone and wants to know who the caller wants to speak with. Although the phrase essentially means “Who is asking for him/her/them,” in a good translation we will paraphrase it with the standard polite equivalents in English:

One warning about this verb: it cannot be used in conjunction with the noun вопрос, which means a question. That is you cannot say «Он спросил вопрос» in the sense of “He asked a question.” For that you must use the verb задавать/задать, which we will discuss tomorrow.

The verb pair просить/попросить can mean either “to ask (someone for something)” or “to ask (someone to do something).” It never means “to ask a question.” It is conjugated like this:

When you ask someone for something, the person asked appears in the genitive case after the preposition у, and the thing for which you ask appears in the accusative case:

If you ask someone to do something, there are two different ways of putting the words together. The first way is just like English: the person you ask is the direct object (accusative case) and the thing you ask them to do is expressed as an infinitive phrase:

The other way is to use a чтобы phrase, which actually can be put together one of two different ways:

These sentences are slightly different in meaning. The second one specifies that the speaker asked his father to drop him off. The first one doesn't specify that. In other words, in the first sentence the speaker might have asked his mother to have his father drop him off.

One of the words that Americans tend to misuse is ресторан restaurant. Ресторан is a place where you go with friends to spend an evening together. Entertainment is often provided. The meal stretches out over many hours. МакДоналдс не ресторан. McDonald's is not a restaurant. At the very kindest McDonald's is a кафе. Кафе is a place where you go to eat, but you don't intend on spending much time there. There is another word that even better catches the idea of what MacDonald's is: забегаловка. The root of the word is бег- which means run, and the за- prefix adds the idea of dropping in briefly, so a забегаловка is a place where you drop in for a quick bite to eat. It's sort of what we would call a fast-food place in the US, but a забегаловка may serve alcohol as well.

Back in 1986 there wasn't a single McDonald's in all of Russia, but now every Russian knows them. Interestingly enough, even though the name of the restaurant is officially МакДоналдс, that's not how Russians usually pronounce it. Usually they pronounce it МакДональд, softening the ell and leaving out the ess, or they pronounce it МакДональдс, softening the ell and keeping the ess. And sometimes the thirty-something crowd of Russians is overshadowed by the muse of verbal efficiency and simply call it Мак-Дак.¹

Extra points to anyone who can tell me how they translate McDonald's slogan “I'm loving it” into Russian.

¹ The Мак-Дак name might also be a jokey adaptation that originated among Russians who saw Скрудж МакДак Scrooge McDuck in Утиные истории Duck Tales, which was broadcast on Russian TV in the early nineties.

Image courtesy of
Wikimedia commons

I guess the world of insects is not well known to широким слоям населения the general public , unless you are a biologist or smth. Myself I got a little exposure to the insect world when I visited my Ukrainian great-grandmother during my childhood. There, I got acquainted with creatures like божья коровка (lit., God's little cow), жуки-солдатики (lit., little soldier beetles), колорадский жук (lit., Colorado beetle), and the most interesting one, медведка, which literally means “little bear thing” but in English is translated as mole cricket. My great grandmother had a big orchard and garden and a big potato field, I used to help her tend the land. To rid the potato bushes of the насекомое-вредитель “insect pest” колорадский жук “Colorado potato beetle” (which we threw in jars with kerosene). Sometimes we saw a nasty creature that looked like a black crawfish coming out from their земляных норок burrows, and that юрко проползало между картофельных кустов scrambled nimbly amidst the potato plants. Seeing them always gave me a nasty feeling. My grandmother usually перерубала их мотыжкой или тяпкой chopped them in two with a hoe or hand rake. it seemed to be the only way to kill them.

Медведки - dangerous creatures, they harm клубни картофеля potato tubers и другие корнеплоды and other root vegetables. They eat them up underground, and if there is a colony of медведок, they can consume the whole potato crop, leaving people without their food supply for the winter. If there is a conventional way to destroy their colonies - I don't know it. Do you? I am wondering if медведки exist in the US? Or are American potatoes safe?

Jan. 12, 2011, Don adds: here's a video that will really give you a good idea of just how gross those медведки are. The video is from antclub.ru.

Попса is a slangy and somewhat deprecatory Russian word for pop music. Sample sentences:

One of the best thing about this decade is that it's easy to find a lot of current Russian music on the web. The links in the sample sentences above will take you to some pop music.

¹ Sentence adapted from this source.

Russians often use the word мясо to mean “red meat,” so if you say «Я не ем мясо» or «Я не ем мяса», you may still be served chicken or fish. “Vegetarian” is вегетарианец or вегетарианка.

When talking about мясо, Russian usually distinguishes between the live animal and the meat on your plate by adding the suffix -ина. Here are some common ones:

The word for “ham” is ветчина, from the adjective ветхий “old,” the opposite of свежий “fresh.”

The suffix –ина is productive, which means you can use it to make interesting meat out of just about any mammal.

Hungry?

* Говядо is the Old Russian word for cow. Nowadays we say корова.

One interesting word in Russian is кинология. The -логия ending corresponds to -logy in English and means "the study of." Every first semester Russian student knows that кино means the movies, so one could be forgiven if one thought that the word meant "film studies." Wrong! Кинология is the study of dogs and how to breed and care for them. The stem is borrowed from the Greek root cyn- which means dog. (The cee in Greek stems was always pronounced like the hard cee in cat, which is why it is represented by к in Russian. Nowadays in English we pronounce it with an ess sound, which misrepresents the original pronunciation.) We have a similar word in English, cynology, but it is uncommon.

We have another word in English that also derives from that stem, which is Cynic. The Cynics were a group of philosophers who rejected material wealth and social conventions. The most famous of them was Diogenes, who is often pictured as carrying a lamp around the earth looking for an honest man. Since they lived on the streets without homes or possessions like dogs, they were called Cynics κυνικόι, which means “doglike ones.”

Y'know, you just never stop learning when you study a foreign language, and last month for the first time I encountered the word псина. The primary meaning of the word is dog meat:

The word is also commonly used to just mean dog as well. If you search for псина on youtube.com, you will find all sorts of videos of people and their dogs doing all sorts of odd tricks, like singing to Gwen Stefani tunes.

Псина also means the smell of a dog or of dog fur:

It seems like all words connected with dogs can be used as general terms of abuse, and псина is no exception, and it can be used of either men or women. If used of a man, it can have masculine gender, and if used of a woman, it has feminine gender:

Note: see discussion of the last sample sentence in the comments section.

The Russian word дог is a false cognate: it doesn't mean dog. It means Great Dane. Although regular nominative plurals often end in -ы, here spelling rule 1 interferes so that the plural is доги. The three Russian spelling rules are:

Spelling rule 1:

After г, к, х, and ж, ч, ш, щ — never write ы, instead use и.

Spelling rule 2:

After ж, ч, ш, щ, and ц — never write an unstressed о, instead use е.

Spelling rule 3:

After ж, ч, ш, щ, ц, and г, к, х, — never write я or ю, instead use а and у.

Another word for dog in Russian is пёс, which specifically means a male dog. The ё in the latter is a fleeting vowel, so the word declines like this:

There are two well-known созвездия constellations that contain this word, and they are Большой Пёс and Малый Пёс, which mean the Big Dog and the Little Dog respectively. In English we mostly use the Latin names for constellations, and the Latin word for dog was canis; thus we call those constellations Canis major and Canis minor.