Russian Word of the Day

No discussion of marriage would be complete in the twenty-first century without discussing однополые браки same-sex marriages:

In the Russian context this immediately poses a conundrum because the most common marriage words are gender specific: the Russian word used to describe a man getting married can be morphologically paraphrased as “to wife himself upon,” and the word that describes a woman getting married can be morphologically paraphrased as “to go out husbanding after.” So a foreigner might be tempted to put together sentences like:

Nope, the Russians won't say it that way. Well, a comedian on stage might, but certainly no one would ever say it with a straight face. The муж- and жен- roots produce too much gender dissonance. Actually that's a problem in English, too. My buddy John won't refer to his long-term partner Adam as his “husband” because “What does that make me, the wife?” Considering how well you cook, John, yeah, I think it does make you the wife. Get over it.

So how will the Russians refer to this? Not surprisingly, they can use the verbs that have no gender-specific roots, e.g. вступать/вступить в брак and заключать/заключить брак. What perhaps is surprising is that if both partners are the subject of the sentence, the verb жениться/пожениться mostly works, too. In other words all these phrases sound grammatically fine:

Here are some examples from the Russian-language press:

Other phrases that are used in discussing the issue of same-sex marriage are:

The most neutral of all the the marriage phrases is вступать/вступить в брак which means to enter into marriage, to get married. By “neutral” I mean that the subject of the verb can be a man or a woman, and the context can be religious or non-religious:

(BTW, if you want to read an article that seriously makes that last claim, you can find it here.)

The phrase заключать/закючить брак “to contract a marriage, get married” means about the same thing as the вступать/вступить в брак, but I've noticed that it seems to be particularly used in contexts where the legal complications of marriage are involved or where the legal implications of marriage are involved:

Last but not least the verb состоять “to be a member of” is often used with the word брак in offical contexts to ask «Вы раньше состояли в браке?» “Have you ever been married?”

* This is an example of what happens when we try to translate a Russian sentence too literally: it comes out strange sounding and wooden. Long Russian sentences, especially those with participial phrases or verbal adverbs, sometimes need to be broken up into two or more sentences so that they sound natural in English. A better translation would be something like: “Boris Berezovski has married Annika Ankiverina, a native of Latvia. This is his third marriage; the previous two have not been dissolved.”

When a woman gets married, the verb commonly used is выходить/выйти, which is irregular in it's conjugation:

The verb in this meaning is always used with the adverb замуж, and the man she marries appears in the accusative case after the preposition за:

¹ Americans get extra points if they can identify these folks.

When a man gets married, the verb commonly used is жениться, which is an odd verb in that it can be interpreted as either imperfective or perfective in this meaning. The woman he marries is expressed in the prepositional case as the object of the preposition на:

Russian has several verbs that mean "to get married." To deal with them properly we have to make some distinctions:

• if we specify the couple that is getting married, then the most common verb pair is жениться/пожениться;
• if we specify the man who is getting married, then the most common verb is жениться, which can be interpreted as either imperfective or perfective;
• if we specify the woman who is getting married, then the most common verb pair is выходить/выйти used in conjunction with the adverb замуж; and
• if we want to use the most colorless, boring, adminisтrative and bureaucratic way to discuss marriage, we say вступать/вступить в брак or заключать/заключить брак.

We'll discuss each one of those phrases separately, starting today with the pair that deals with couples. When we discuss couples or people in general getting married, the verb pair to use is жениться/пожениться:

¹ You get an extra point if you are an American and recognize who these people are. Russians, of course, will recognize the first person right away.

The verb pair звонить/позвонить has several meanings, the most important of which is “to call” in the sense of “to call on the phone.” It is a completely regular end-stressed second conjugation verb:

The person you call shows up in the dative case:

Now here's the tricky part for us English speakers: when you specify the place you call, it does NOT appear in the dative. Instead it shows up in the accusative case after the preposition в if the place is a в word, and in the accusative after на if the place is a на word:

If you say both the person and the place, the person still shows up in the dative, and the place still shows up in the accusative after в/на:

The place you call can be one of several adverbs as well: сюда, туда, домой.

Last but not least, if you want to specify the number you are calling, include it in the nominative case after the phrase по телефону:

Cultural detail: although in Russia one can call the police at 02, a new number, 112, is being introduced specifically for auto accidents. The new number was first implemented in Курск and should be implemented throughout the rest of the country by 2012. (article | mirror)

The verbs значить and означать both mean “to mean.” In the following sentences they can be used interchangeably. For instance:

Although these words often completely overlap in meaning, there are times when they don't mean quite the same thing. Означать can also mean “to indicate,” whereas значить does not:

Last but not least, значить can mean “to be emotionally significant,” but означать does not bear that meaning:

One of the great things about the internet is that it's really easy to access Russian language materials nowadays. One of the most amazing sites is livejournal.com. I'm not quite sure why, but livejournal quickly became a major center of Russian blogging. When you start look at these blogs and forums, you will encounter various words and phrases that are either unique to the internet or have a curious history buried in technology. For instance someone might write «У меня сдох винт». You look up винт and discover it's primary meaning is screw. My screw died? That doesn't make much sense. And then someone tells you that винт is computer jargon for hard disk. Ah, now you understand. But why the heck would the word for screw come to mean hard drive? A hard drive doesn't look like a screw. Sure, you can turn a screw, and a hard drive turns, but that's really stretching it. It turns out that there is a good reason. One of the early hard drives, the IBM 3340, was nicknamed "the Winchester," which in Russian gets transliterated Винчестер, which got shortened to винт.

One of things you'll see quite often when you start reading Russian-language forums and blogs is ЗЫ. Once again you go to the dictionary, and this time you don't find a blessed thing. You notice that the ЗЫ is usually toward the end of an entry or comment. You notice that it is often followed by a comma or a colon. So what's the scoop? Here's the explanation. Let's say you are typing at a computer, and the computer has a standard QWERTY keyboard. And let's say you are typing in the standard Russian keyboard mapping that comes with MS Windows. The letter З is on the P key, and the letter Ы is on the S key. PS = postscript! That's right. The Russians are basically writing PS, but they aren't being anal-retentive enough to switch their keyboard to English just to write those two letters. You can see an example of this here (mirror).

There are lots of other fun vocabulary bits in Russian internetspeak. For instance a smiley is called смайлик, and the @ symbol is called a собака. Okay, readers, let's hear your guesses where the Russian word for that last item comes from. If you want to have a bit of fun, read the Russian Wikipedia entry on Компьютерный сленг internet slang. It's great!

The word бабочка means butterfly or moth.

Вампир is one of several words that means vampire.

So the obvious question is how would you say “vampire moths”? That would be «бабочки-вампиры». The even more obvious question is why the heck would you want to say such a thing? The answer: blood-sucking moths have been discovered in Siberia. Really. I'm not kidding. Now we Americans have another reason never to leave the safety of our monolingual homes.

You can read about the critters here (mirror with translation).

The verb pair писать/написать means “to write.” Sample sentences:

Note carefully that the с becomes ш when you conjugate the verb in non-past forms; that's called a consonant mutation. Notice also that the а drops out in the present, imperative, and perfective future forms:

For some verbs it doesn't matter too much if you get the stress wrong, but it's important to get this one right on the infinitive because if you put the stress on wrong syllable you end up with писать, which means “to pee.” This of course reminds me of a classic joke:

In Russian the joke is funny not just because of the one-upmanship, but also because писать is a word you expect to hear out of a child, not out of a grown man with an education from one of the world's best schools.

The verb pair гулять/погулять means “to take a walk.” It is often used with the preposition по followed by the dative case: «Мы погуляли по парку» “We took a walk around the park,” where “around” means “aimlessly here and there through the park” not “in a precise circle around the park.” In the spread-out cities of the American West people don't take walks so much for pleasure nowadays; you practically have to drive to your own kitchen. But in Russia walking around in the evening or the afternoon is still a big part of socializing.

That's actually a common thing to do in St. Petersburg. (The bridges have to open to let boats travel up and down the river.) Or you can stroll around the streets of Moscow after the stores have closed, admiring the buildings and enjoying the eternal twilight of Russian summer evenings. Ugh. Did I really just write “eternal twilight”? What a cliché.

Гулять can also mean “to goof off.” A mother might shout at her son «Боря, чего ты гуляешь во дворе? Ты должен быть в школе!» “Boris, what are doing goofing off in the yard? You're supposed to be at school!”

When a Russian mother can't stand having her child inside anymore, she'll also use this word in the context where an American mother might use the word “play”:

(The phrase «на улице» literally means “on the street,” but the mother isn't saying “Go play in the street” out of some poorly-hidden filicidal wish. Instead «на улице» is one of the standard Russian phrases for “outside.”) Other variations: «Иди погулять» “Go play” and «Сходи на улицу» “Go outside.”

By extension of the “goofing off” meaning, гулять also can mean “to have a good time, party, whoop it up,” which leads us to a joke. It's a joke based on a pun, and puns don't translate well unless the target language has the same duplication of meaning in the punning word as the source language. We'll have to explain it in detail, which means the joke won't be that funny, but what the heck...

So why is this funny? Well, the primary meaning of the “whooping it up” word is “to take a walk,” and the phrase translated “getting started” means “walking” (i.e., walking to the store to buy vodka and get started), so in effect, he is saying “our buddies are already walking around, but we are just walking.” And of course the guy they spotted is already so plastered that he's lying under the fence and can't walk. And he is already so drunk that you can hardly say he is whooping it up. And the guys who are about to get equally plastered are feeling envious of the totally unenviable slob lying there on the ground. Now that's funny... um, right? In a kind of pathetic alcoholic way?

To say "at five minutes to two" a Russian literally says "without five two," where the preposition без means without and governs the genitive case. The "minute" words are often left out, but not necessarily so. When speaking of the minutes to one o'clock, they usually leave the number "one" out and simply say "hour." For example:

When speaking of "minutes till" for the other hours of the clock, they usually leave out the word "hour." Other examples:

Other entries dealing with time are under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

To the Russian way of thinking, the first hour the sixty minutes from midnight to (but not including) one. The second hour is between one and two. Therefore when saying "at twelve oh one" in Russian you literally say "at one minute of the first." The number phrases after в show up in the accusative case. For example:

Other examples:

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

To say "at a quarter to two," a Russian literally says "without a quarter two," where the preposition без means without and governs the genitive case. The word четверть means quarter and is a feminine third-declension noun which takes и in the genitive signular. When speaking of a quarter to one, they usually leave the number "one" out and simply say "hour." When speaking of the other "quarter tos," they usually leave out the word "hour."

For most time phrases, the way you say “It is now such-and-such o'clock” is different from the way you say “It happened at such-and-such o'clock.” When addressing times that are a quarter to the hour, however, the “what time is it” construction is the same as the “at what time” construction. Thus:

The time expression can also be used in the past and future tenses:

Since most other "at such-and-such a time" phrases start with the preposition в, it's a common mistake by beginning students of Russian to assume that the same holds true for times at a quarter to the hour. It does not. One never says in Russian «в без четверти семь»:

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

To the Russian way of thinking, the first hour of the day is the sixty minutes from midnight up to (but not including) one a.m. The second hour is between one and two. Therefore when saying "It starts at 1:15" in Russian you literally say "It starts at one quarter of the second."

To express the idea that something happens on the quarter hour, the preposition в is used with the accusative case, not the prepositional. The word четверть means quarter. Here's a complete list of typical time phrases on the quarter hour.

The same time expressions work in the past and future as well.

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

To the Russian way of thinking, the first hour of the day is the sixty minutes from midnight up to (but not including) one a.m. The second hour is between one and two. Therefore “It starts at 7:30” is literally phrased “It starts at half of the eighth.”

To express the idea that something happens on the half hour, the preposition в is used with the prepositional case, not the accusative. The word половина means half. Here's a complete list of typical time phrases on the half hour.

The same time expressions work in the past and future as well.

There is also an abbreviated way of saying the same thing where «пол» a morpheme meaning “half,” combines with the genitive ordinal number to make a single word that indicates half past the hour. That's right: Russian has a single word that means “one thirty,” and another one that means “two thirty,” etc. Here's a complete listing.

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

The phrases "Когда?" and "Во сколько?" and "В котором часу?" can all mean "At what time?" Oddly enough, even though "В котором часу?" asks the question in the locative-prepositional case, the answer usually comes in the form of a time phrase in the accusative case after the preposition в.

Examples:

To express the idea that something happens on the hour straight up, the preposition в is used with the accusative case. Thus in the phrase «в час» “at one o'clock” the word час is put in the accusative case. Notice also that the Russians do not usually express the number один, but rather the let the singular form of час do all the work. In «в два часа» it's the word два that is in the accusative case, and then the number два requires the genitive singular of час. That holds true in the phrases «в три часа» and «в четыре часа» as well. For all the rest of the o'clocks, e.g. «в пять часов», etc., the numbers require the genitive plural of час.

Here we have a table with all the possible times of day on the hour.

These time phrases can also be used in the past and future tenses.

The words полдень noon and полночь midnight are also used in time telling in the accusative case:

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

The simplest way to say at what time something happens in Russian is also the oddest way to the English speaker's mind: by indicating during which hour it occurs. To do so we use the prepositional case after the preposition в. The word час has an irregular form in the prepositional singular, which is часу. The phrase «в первом часу» thus means the period from 12:00 to 12:59. Assume someone asks the question «Когда Борис обычно приезжает домой?» “What time does Boris usually come home?” Here's the complete list of possible responses using this construction.

Since English doesn't have an exact equivalent phrase, sometimes one might fudge in how the phrase is translated, depending on the context. Thus we might translate «Он приехал в шестом часу» as:

• He arrived after five.
• He arrived between five and six.
• He arrived before six.

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

There are three ways to ask “When?” in Russian if you are referring to the time of day, and they are «Когда?» “When?”, «Во сколько?» “At what time?”, and «В котором часу?» “In which hour?”. «Когда?» is the most common, followed by «Во сколько?» and although «В котором часу?» is perfectly grammatical, it is slowly becoming less common nowadays.

When answering these questions, Russian again uses quite a few different constructions, just as it does when answering the question “What time is it?” Specifically one has to distinguish when something happens:

• right on the hour, or
• at a quarter after the hour, or
• at a quarter to the hour, or
• at half past the hour, or
• at a particular minute during the first half of the hour, or
• at a particular mintue during the second half of the hour, or
• generically somewhere between one hour or another.

Over the next couple of weeks we will explore the details of those constructions.

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

To say "It is five minutes to two," a Russian literally says "It is now without five two." The word for “without” is без, which is a preposition that governs the genitive case. The "minute" words are often left out, but not necessarily so. When speaking of the minutes to one o'clock, they usually leave the number "one" out and simply say "hour." Examples:

When speaking of minutes till the rest of the hours, they usually leave out the forms of the word "hour." For example:

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

To the Russian way of thinking, the first hour of the day is made up of the first sixty minutes from midnight to one o'clock (but not including one o'clock). The second hour is from one to just before two. Therefore when saying "It is now 12:01" in Russian you literally say "It is now one minute of the first." For example:

Notice particularly the forms of минута after одна, две, три and четыре.

Other examples:

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

To say that it is quarter till the hour you use the word for quarter which is четверть. 1:45 in Russian comes out «без четверти два», literally “without a quarter two.” The preposition без takes the genitive case, and четверть is a feminine third declension noun, thus the и ending. Here is a complete listing of times at a quarter to the hour as expressed with четверть.

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."