Archives for: December 2009, 16

И (часть первая)

December 16th, 2009 by Don

After their first week of class all Russian students know that и means “and”:

Мама и папа собирали картошку в колхозе. Mom and Dad harvested potatoes at the collective farm.
Ксюша создала веб-сайт для русских невест и американских женихов. Kseniya created a web-site for Russian brides and American grooms.

It's so simple, why the heck would anyone bother to blog about it? Listen carefully, my children: the word и will save you grief in learning Russian. For instance, once you have learned the word и, you never have to learn a separate word for both! For instance…

И мама, и папа говорят по-русски. Both Mom and Dad speak Russian.

See how easy that is! And what's wonderful is that it's not only nouns that can be coordinated that way, but also verbs, adverbs, and prepositional phrases:

Папа и говорит, и пишет по-русски. Dad both speaks and writes Russian.
Я говорю и по-русски, и по-испански. I speak both Russian and Spanish.
Мой брат был и в Египте, и на Аляске. My brother has been in both Egypt and Alaska.

Actually the и can connect more than two words. In English, theoretically, we should only use “both” when coordinating two items, but sometimes when we are not thinking too carefully about what we are saying, we use it in constructions where more than two items are coordinated:

Я говорю и по-русски, и по-испански, и по-английски. I speak both Russian and Spanish and English.

In Russian it's perfectly fine to coordinate more than two items with и, whereas in English if you use “both” in the context, rude pedants will correct you. I say “rude” because Mama taught us that we shouldn't correct the speech of other people unless they specifically ask us to.

Posted in Conjunctions | 2 comments »