My Яussian эxpеriэncе: language-rebel

12:26:00

This is an article I was asked to write by one of my pen pals. She asked me to enrich her blog with the whimsical happenings that befell upon me (and as a direct extension, upon her, as part of my misunderstandings ended up in our chat in the form of questions directed to her) in the course of my obstinate, headstrong and nastoychiviy attempt to understand the secrets of the “mighty and magnanimous” Russian language.

This nickname, or eponym - if you value the precise onomastics, is to the Russian language, as “man’s best friend” is to a dog, “king of the animals” is to a lion, and “that stupid animal from ‘Ice age’” is to a sloth. I’m not kidding, for all intents and purposes, if you mention the aforementioned phrase, the thought of its correspondent term will immediately dawn upon your interlocutors (as long as they’re from area, or just have good trivia knowledge). I don’t know when, or how, for that matter, but every Russian boy and girl grow up knowing his native tongue is nothing short of one of humanity’s epic wins ever (after microwave burritos, and tequila, of course). Well, they’re not entirely wrong :)

From a purely grammatical point of view, Russian’s quite fantastic. Have you ever wanted to go a bit out of your way in terms of eloquence, and find a nifty, glib adjective for a noun in English, only to find it’s an obscurely esoteric Latin derivative, that will make you sound like a dork, or a reincarnation of Mark Anthony? Well, Russian’s flexible grammar solves that problem by easily (yet, alas, not always consistently) forming an intuitive adjective from almost any noun (yep, you can say “kitcheny”, “shoey”, and even “tabley” - without the trepidation of sounding silly). More so, they often say Russian’s hard to learn, and that might be partly because it has, borrowing the Russian term for an excessively copious amount of something, an up-to-your-ding-dong number of verbs, it’s crazy. I’ve been learning Russian for a bit more than two years now, writing down any unknown verb I stumble upon in a list for future study, and let me tell you, I’ve got more than 4,000 items in the verb list. Now that’s a big plus in terms of philology, as there are many synonyms, and many more shades of meaning one can discern between for a very comprehensive and accurate recount of reality, and a big headache for the learners, as one has to learn to distinguish between very similar uses and shades of one general meaning (that’s often expressed in English, French, Hebrew and Arabic with one verb). If you thought that’s bad, you’re literally seeing only half of the picture, as 98% of Russian verbs have at least one “double” that’s used to denote different temporal aspects of the action.

http://agon-noga.livejournal.com/

That said, as is the case in between any two given languages, there will always be gaps and discrepancies amidst their vocabularies, but a funny thing is that in Russian there are (single-worded) verbs for “doing all the laundry for someone”, “engage in tea drinking”, “coat something with breadcrumbs”, “kiss all around”, 3 different verbs for “to fart”, and verbs for the production of certain human sounds such as “aou”, “chyo”, “ghe”, “to” and so forth, but not for “to float”, “to taste” (in general, as in “chocolate ice-cream tastes great”) and “to sue”.

I can gloze, prate, blabber, jabber, prattle, gibber and yammer on and on about the intricacies and the inner-workings of the grammatical system, inclinations, conjugations, declensions, prefixes, suffixes, cases, whatever amusing mishaps and blunders that transpired to me with them and what not, but the end result of which will be that my lovely article will have all the aroma of a boring and musty study-book.

Instead, I’ll cut it short, and just mention a handful of words that Russian, according to this writer, has got right, and I mean #epicwin right.

Khryushka - a piglet/piggy

Khryushka-pavtaryushka - a copycat (lit: a repeating piggy)

Pimpochka/pindyulka - thingamajiggy, whatamacallit, thingamabob

Fufaika - a sort of sweater vest

Ooshlyopok - a butt-head.

And, in this, fellow random by-comers, I’ll conclude my session and bid you a warm Russian, saying “until-meeting!”