Russian Word of the Day

Всходы is a fun little word. The prefix вс- means upward. The root ход- means go. When you put them together into a word that is only used in the plural, it means sprouts, i.e. the tiny little beginnings of plants that have just come up out of the soil. Here's a sample sentence:

Under the influence of books like “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto” by Michael Pollan and “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” by Barbara Kingsolver, I decided to do some container gardening on my patio. I went to the farmer's market and bought some Green Zebra tomatoes. I liked them so much that I squeezed out some seeds, fermented them and planted them:

Since работать/поработать means “to work,” you will want to be able to use it to say that so-and-so works for so-and-so. Beginning students of Russian often use the word для as the most generic word for “for,” (not the best idea, incidentally), so one might be tempted to translate “I work for Honeywell” as «Я работаю для фирмы “Хоневелл”». Nope, that would be error. When you want to express the idea that you work full time for an organization, the prepositions you want are в and на followed by the prepositional case. (Follow the general guideliness for selecting на.)

Now here is a subtlety. If you work for a company or organization part time, then you work на followed by the accusative case:

¹ Фирма is normally a на word. Why the heck the Russians say в in this context is a mystery to me.

If you want to express the idea that someone works “as something,” then you put the profession in the instrumental case without a preposition:

The corresponding question would be «Кем вы работаете?» “As what do you work?” Although that awful translation captures the grammatical ideas, a good translation would be simply “What do you do for a living?”

The verb работать/поработать can also mean “to work on” in the sense of “to fine tune one's skills,” “to improve something.” Thus “I'm working on my pronunciation” comes out «Работаю над произношением». Other examples:

The verb работать/поработать is absolutely regular. Not a single irregular form. Sort of comforting, in its own way:

The first meaning of работать is “to have a job” or “to be working”:

The Russian word for minus is минус, and it can be used out loud in simple subraction statements. Notice the Russians use the future tense будет where Americans use present tense is:

This is a very informal way of talking. In formal Russian the first example sentence comes out much more complicated:

The word can also be used when discussing negative numbers and temperatures:

When we start out in our Russian studies, it's tough for us Americans to know how to read numerical phrases out loud. In this case they come out like this:

Notice that the word минус doesn't change for case here.

The Russian word for plus is плюс, and it can be used out loud in simple addition statements. Notice the Russians use the future tense будет where Americans use present tense is:

This is a very informal way of talking. In formal Russian it comes out much more complicated:

The word can also be used when discussing positive numbers and temperatures:

When we start out in our Russian studies, it's tough for us Americans to know how to read abbreviations and numerical phrases out loud. In this case they come out like this:

Notice that the word плюс doesn't change for case here, and that a normal Russian won't say «по Цельсию» out loud in a context where everyone knows they are talking about degrees Celsius.

Although the most basic meaning of бросать/бросить is “to throw,” the word also can mean “to abandon/leave (someone).” The person who is abandoned appears in the accusative case:

Although the most basic meaning of бросать/бросить is “to throw,” the word also can mean “to quit (doing something).” The thing you quit doing is expressed with an infinitive phrase.

The most basic verb that means “to throw” in Russian is бросать/бросить. It conjugates like this:

This verb can be used in three constructions. The thing you throw goes in the accusative case. The thing you throw it into/onto goes in the accusative case after the preposition в or на:

If you throw something to someone, then that person appears in the dative case and no preposition is needed:

If you throw something at someone, then the person who is the target goes in the accusative case after the preposition в:

Other prepositions can also be used with this verb. You can throw something behind something (за + accusative) or under something (под + accusative).

When you want to say that something is ending-finishing, but you don't particulary care who is bringing the process to an end, then the most common verbs are кончаться/кончиться and заканчиваться/закончиться.

The second verb is conjugated at the end of this entry. You usually find both verbs only in third-person forms, only rarely in the first- and second-person forms. They can both be used pretty well equivalently in all tenses:

If you want to express the idea of ending-finishing-stopping something, you can use one of several specific verbs. The most basic verb is кончать/кончить.

Just like начинать/начать, this verb can be complemented by either a noun or an infinitive phrase. In either case the person finishing the process appears in the nominative. When working with nouns, the thing that ends is in the accusative case:

When using an infinitive phrase after this verb, that infinitive MUST be an imperfective infinitive:

Here is where things get odd. It turns out that in colloquial Russian кончать/кончить also means “to have an orgasm, to come.” This occasionally leads students into difficulty. Just imagine some poor American student back in the eighties studying assiduously at Moscow State University. One day he glances up and asks his teacher whether she had finished her comments by saying «Вы кончили?» She takes it the wrong way. All of the sudden her cheeks turn red, and the poor student glances at her in confusion, but then at lunch time he finds her slipping her hand into his, and they spend the rest of the summer taking furtive trips to Leningrad until her ex-boyfriend starts stalking them. Actually the ex-boyfriend turned out to be a decent guy, once I plied him with enough Georgian wine. It turns out that he really wasn't all that much into her and was just stalking her out of principle. He was happy to vanish forever once I slipped him a hundred samolians. But then Lena stopped talking to me and I started following her home and —

Um… well, you get the idea. Anything can happen when you don't know the various meanings of the words you use.

Nowadays Russians use the verb заканчивать/закончить more often than кончать/кончить. It works exactly the same way, is perfectly regular, and does not have that problematic secondary meaning. Thus all those sample sentences above can be rephrased with заканчивать/закончить without any change of meaning. The кончать/кончить versions are perfectly grammatical; it's just that the other verb is slowly supplanting it.

One thing that you CANNOT do is to use either of these verbs in the sense of “The movie ended at 5:00.” For that you must use the reflexive forms of the verb, which we will discuss tomorrow.

Another word that catches the idea of starting a process is браться/взяться. It conjugates like this:

The verb means to start an activity using some kind of tool or object, which shows up in the accusative case after the preposition за:

When you want to say that something is starting, but you don't particulary care who is starting the process, then the most common verb is начинаться/начаться.

You usually find this verb only in third-person forms, only rarely in the first- and second-person forms. Sample sentences:

To communicate the idea of starting a process, Russian can either use specific verbal prefixes or one of several specific verbs. The most basic verb is начинать/начать.

The verb can be complemented by either a noun or an infinitive phrase. In either case the person who starts the process is in the nominative case. When working with nouns, the thing that starts is in the accusative case:

When using an infinitive phrase after this verb, that infinitive MUST be an imperfective infinitive:

One thing you CANNOT do with this verb is to say something like “The movie starts at 5:00.” For that you need the reflexive form of the verb, which we will discuss tomorrow.

As I recall, back in 1997 nobody had cell phones in Russia.* Now they are all over the place. “Mobile phone” is trans­lated мобильный телефон or мобиль­ник, and cell phone is trans­lated сотовый телефон, although sometimes people just say сотовый. And young Russians send text messages like crazy. Properly speaking, the text message protocol is called SMS, the Short Message System. “Text message” is translated текстовое сообщение, but really almost no one says that. Usually people write СМС (pronounced эсэмэс) or смс-ка (pronounced эсэмэска), or sometimes they just write it in Latin letters as SMS.

In the early days of Russian texting, only Latin letters were available, so the Russians wrote things like:

That approach to writing Russian is often called транслит. There are several ways to go about transliterating Russian with Latin letters, and you can read about them in this Wikipedia article. The Russians aren't particularly consistent in how they use транслит, so the example we used above might come out “zdu teba u vhoda v biblioteku.” Sometimes that leads to humorous misunderstandings:

Here the texter meant “S Pashoi” to represent «С Пасхой», which is an Easter greeting. The other texter mistook the h to be part of ш, and thus a typo for «С Пашей» “With Paul.”

Although many Russian cell phones can now send/receive text messages in Cyrillic, often people send them still in Latin letters. Sometimes they do this because the person they are sending to has a phone that can't receive Cyrillic. But there is another reason that people write in Latin even when both sender and receiver have phones that work with Cyrillic. It turns out that for technical reasons a Cyrillic text message is limited to a maximum of 70 characters, whereas one written in Latin letters and numbers can have up to 160 characters.

Quick texters in English use T9 predictive keying. Not surprisingly, it has also been adapted to Russian:

Т9 - офигенно удобная штука, смс-ки сейчас набираю только ею. (source)	T9 is awesomely convenient. It's the only way I type text messages now.
А я всегда пользуюсь этой функцией… только смешно получается, если я что-то пишу, а слово получается не то, а я так и отправляю Например, если написать "сижу дома, скучаю, хорошо, что у меня пиво есть", то автоматом вместо "пиво" пишется "план" (Adapted from this source)	Well I always use this function… only it comes out funny if I write something and the wrong word comes out and I send it. For instance, if I write “I'm at home, bored, good thing I have beer,” then the algorithm writes “dope” instead of “beer.”

* For comparison's sake, I should say that I purchased my first cell phone in the States in 1998, although they were available before that.

Война means war. It is a на word:

The most common word for one in Russian is один in its various forms. Morphologically it is an adjective, which means it occurs in masculine, feminine, neuter, and plural forms in all six cases:

Since один is an adjective, it has to agree with its noun in gender:

Why would you need the plural of the number one? You may encounter the plural of один when specifying that you have one item that is pluralia tantum. Plurale tantum are nouns that only occur in the plural. In English we have a few nouns like that, such as pants. You don't say “Hand me the pant” even if you mean just one item of clothing. Instead you say “Hand me the pants.” In Russian the words брюки pants and часы “a watch” only occur in the plural, so if you want to specify one pair of pants or one watch, you theoretically can use the plural of один:

Alas, the Russian number system is not entirely stable, and occasionally you might find an odd bird who objects to using одни with these words. The issue of how to combine numbers with plurale tantum is quite complex, so for the moment trust me that the Russians often say it this way.

Back in 1988 or so I was in Moscow at «Дом книги» with a former student. He was thirsty. I asked a saleswoman whether there was any place he could get a drink of water. I figured the woman would say to one of her coworkers something like «Покажи нашему гостю, где попить» “Show our guest where to get a drink.” Instead she said, «Надь, напои этого мальчика» “Nadya, water this boy.”

Wow, talk about a learning moment. Once again a Russian had shown me her ability to compress what was a multiword phrase in English into a single Russian verb: поить/напоить. The verb means “to give [something] [to someone] to drink,” and it's conjugated like this:

The person or animal that will be drinking shows up in the accusative case. The thing you give them to drink shows up in the instrumental case:

Note: standard dictionaries describe the stress pattern of this verb as either shifting-stress or end-stressed. All the native speakers I have consulted prefer the shifting stress pattern shown here.

On July 4th I neglected to put together anything for the blog, so to assuage my feelings of patriotic inadequacy, today we will discuss the word орёл eagle. The ё is a fleeting vowel, so the word declines like this:

The bald eagle is one of the symbols of the USA, and in Russian one of the names for it is белоголовый орлан, literally “the white-headed sea-eagle”:

Actually, in standard translations both the phrase «белоголовый орлан» and «aмериканский орёл» should be rendered “Bald Eagle,” but on this occasion I've rendered them in a more word-for-word fashion to point out how the phrases are constructed.

Of course the US is not the only country to use eagles in its symbology. Imperial Russia used the double-headed eagle «двуглавый орёл» on its coat of arms. The coat of arms of the current Russian Federation also uses the double-headed eagle.

Imperial Russian coat of arms (Courtesy of Wikipedia)	Russian Federation coat of arms (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Last week we discussed the four verbs most commonly used to mean “to die” in Russian: умирать/умереть, погибать/погибнут, скончаться, and сдыхать/сдохнуть. If you have mastered those, you are able to express pretty well all the most standard shades of meaning. However…

Every Russian will also know a few more synonymous verbs like издыхать/издохнуть, which is used when an animal dies, i.e., it means the same thing as сдыхать/сдохнуть and is conjugated the same way, but it has a more folksy, less educated sound to it. It doesn't have the status of “literary language” as сдыхать/сдохнуть does.

Then there is the imperfective дохнуть, which means the same thing, but is again conversational, not part of the literary language. (Note this is distinct from the verb дохнуть, which means something else entirely.) From дохнуть is derived the verb pair подыхать/подохнуть, which means the same thing.

Then there is околевать/околеть. This word is part of the literary language, and it means that an animal has died. For some people the verb implies that the corpse is already growing cold or stiff, and for some people it implies dying of cold.

Then there is the imperfective verb гибнуть, which means “to perish, die in tragic circumstances” and applies to people.

Then there is the imperfective verb мереть, which is conversational or low-style and can be used when people die. It's used in the incredibly wide-spread phrase «мрут, как мухи» “they are dying like flies.”

Last but not least, there is помирать/помереть, which nowadays is folksy, uneducated speech, and it can be used when people die. In the 19th century, though, this was just a normal word for “to die,” so you can find it in classic Russian literature without any sense of folksiness.

That gives us at least eight different ways to say “Our cow died.”

Let's discuss the differences:

There is one more significant word for “to die,” which is погибать/погибнуть. It means “to perish” and communicates the idea that the death was tragic. Sometimes it seems to add the idea of nobility or heroism. It is conjugated like this:

Here are some sample sentences:

When an animal dies, the word Russians usually use is сдыхать/сдонуть, which conjugates like this:

Sample sentences:

Since the verb implies dying like an animal, it is sometimes used in insults and vulgar expressions.

When people are grieving it feels harsh to use the word умирать/умереть for “to die.” In those contexts it's better to use the verb “to pass away,” which in Russian is скончаться. It only exists in the perfective with that prefix, but кончаться/кончиться can have roughly the same meaning as well.

Sample sentences:

That last quote is from a site that collects romantic text messages. Romantic. Hm. My first reaction was to think that it's more like horny and desperate text messages. But then I thought again. The truth is that we never know when those we love will die. If we don't show our love to them now, we might never have a chance again. Choose today to show love to those around you.