Russian Word of the Day

The other day I was talking with my buddy Юрий when my brain rаn up against a linguistic wall: I didn't know how to say “I lost my voice” in Russian. Of course, a good language student never lets the lack of vocabulary stop him. He just improvises with words he does know. So I said “у меня исчез голос”, literally “at me the voice disappeared.” That made the communicative point and the conversation continued, but I was irked that I didn't really know the way a Russian would normally say it. So I started asking about that concept and here's what I came up with.

First of all, there is the verb хрипнуть/охрипнуть, which covers two concepts in English: “to have/get a hoarse voice” and “to lose one's voice.” The verb is conjugated like this:

Since this verb covers the meaning of two different phrases, sometimes it has two possible translations:

That means that if you are translating something from Russian to English, you might have to pay close attention to context to see whether completely losing the voice or becoming hoarse is the point. Of course, there can't be that many contexts where it's important to distinguish between simply becoming hoarse (partially losing one's voice) and completely losing one's voice, so maybe the issue is mostly moot.

Here's another example:

There are a couple other phrases that mean the same thing. We can use the verb оседать/осесть “to sink” or терять/потерять “to lose.” For instance: