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

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.

Today I'd like to write about пирожки (singular пирожок), a word maybe as famous as матрёшка , although the former belongs to the food category and is not a souvenir as the latter. Russian cuisine is famous for its doughy things, and пирожки are among them. Basically, it is dough with filling inside. The filling can be anything: berries, mushrooms, roots, vegetables… anything you wish to put in there. The dough is not a simple dough, however, but a little complicated to make, and it takes time to master the skill of preparing it. In Russian it is called сдобное тесто. Recipes vary, but the thing they all have in common is that they have yeast, and and the dough takes time to rise. Many great Russian authors, e.g. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Paustovsky, and Turgenev, numerous times mention in their writings the process of making the dough for pirozhki (or for bliny, like Сhehov, who wrote a special short story about it, «О бренности»; see «Как испечь блины по-чеховски?» for details . K. Paustovsky in his autobiographical novel «Повесть о жизни/Розовые олеандры» discusses the making of куличи (a type of пирожки for Easter), and he calls the process of preparing the dough священнодействием а sacred act:

I myself remember the same kind of feistiness over making dough for kulichi. Maybe it is because kulichi are for Easter, and because of the religious connotation, extra care was needed. Usually for regular pirozhki it is much less demanding! Kulichi don't have a filling; they are made in oval molds and have raisins inside. Pirozhki have the filling, as I mentionned above, and here each chooses each own! My all time favorites are two kinds: pirozhki with eggs and green onions, and pirozhki with apples. One has to boil a few eggs, and then finely chop them with green onions, and add salt and pepper. For the kind with apples I stew finely chopped applles with water and sugar for about forty minutes, making sure they stay moist, adding water if necessary, and then put them in pirozhki. The last trick (but not the least!): do not forget to baste your pirozhki with egg (beat one egg with a whisk for basting) before baking, it will add such glamour to your pirozhki that they will be hard to resist, just like in that picture! Actually, the pirozhki in the picture I made myself for a party at my house, they turned out very delicious, and everyone liked them!

Good luck with making your own pirozhki, and

ПРИЯТНОГО АППЕТИТА ! BON APPETIT !

The other day an anonymous querent wondered about the correct way to say “Thanks for the salmon!” The answer is: that depends.

If you mean that you are grateful for an entire salmon, then the word you want is a masculine word ending in a soft sign: лосось. If you mean that you are grateful for a filet of the fish which you intend to consume as food, then the word you want is a feminine word: лососина. Thus:

Actually лосось can also mean simply the flesh of the animal, but every once in a while you will meet some pedant who will want you to distinguish the two words.

In the US one associates salmon particularly with the the states of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon. In Russia Камчатка is the major нерестилище of salmon. A нерестилище “spawning ground” is a place where fish lay their eggs.