Russian Word of the Day

The Russian word “рынок” is the equivalent of the English word “market.” Just like the word “market” it is used to describe economic structures in which people trade, exchange, buy and sell, whether goods, specific services or valuable information.

Here are some examples of this discordant word:

But most of the time when Russians, especially the elderly, refer to a “рынок” they are speaking of the food market where they buy meat, vegetables and etc.

Example:

There used to be a large food market near the street where my grandparents lived in Moscow. This “рынок” had almost anything— from black caviar to bananas to rabbits. But nothing too foreign for the Russian stomach like avocadoes, mango, or—God forbid—peanut butter. The “рынок” was split into an indoor and an outdoor section. All the meat, poultry, fish and dairy products were sold inside at bargain prices and all the produce, sweets and drinks outside.

Sanitary conditions were not superb, especially in the murky, foul-smelling meat department where butchers displayed expressionless pig heads on counters, often surrounded by flies. Nevertheless I don’t think I’ve ever got food poisoning, and for thousands of people it was the place for food shopping. Outside, old grandmothers stood at corners with sheaves of cilantro, parsley and lettuce, next to them all kinds of sweets were set out on tables. If it was the right season you could buy tasty strawberries real cheap, or pull out a few more rubles and get an Uzbek watermelon.

As time passed the “рынок” became smaller while the prices doubled. The old building was demolished, most of the vendors kicked out, and everything rebuilt in a strange kind of way. The new structure has a fresh look to it now, and you will certainly find peanut butter and limes. Мangos are still rare. Overall the change was for the better, but I miss the old place.

The Russian word for a letter, in the sense of letters you send in the mail, is письмо. Notice there is a stress shift in the plural, and note also that the soft sign is replaced by е in the genitive plural:

Sample sentences:

The word is sometimes also in the phrase «на письме», which means “in writing” as opposed to “in conversation”:

No one on the planet is as joyfully anal-retentive as copy editors, those people responsible for the proper positioning of commas and quotation marks in printed works. In English doubtless their greatest joy is knowing the difference between a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash. The Russians also are not bereft of this joy, and thus today we will discuss the differences between the дефис hyphen and the тире dash. The former is a perfectly regular masculine noun, and the latter is an indeclinable neuter noun.

Just as in English, in Russian the дефис hyphen is used to break words into syllables or to split a word at the end of a line. It is also used in words ending in -то and -нибудь, etc; words beginning with кое-; and adverbs beginning with по-:

The тире, called a dash by most English speakers and called an “em dash” by the typographically more sophisticated, is used quite a bit more in Russian than in English. First off, it is used to mark direct speech. In this case no quotation marks are used, and the тире occurs at the beginning of a new paragraph and is followed immediately by a space:

When used to indicate a range of numerical values, then the тире is used with no spaces on either side:

In all other uses of the тире it should have spaces on both sides. Note that this is different from English, where no spaces are to be used around an em dash. One use of this type of тире that takes some getting used to for American students is in sentences where English would use is, am, or are, which of course the Russians mostly leave out in the present tense. The Russians also use it when they are leaving out other implied words:

We should point out one picky detail: Russian typewriters don't have a key for the тире. The same is true for most standard Russian computer keyboards. For that reason in manually typed documents you will often find «два дефиса подряд» “two hyphens in a row” substituting for a тире. Yes, you type spaces on both sides. Of course in this day of slap-dash internet discourse, most people don't bother with the double hyphen for тире; instead they just write a single hyphen with spaces on either side.

Doubtless there is someone out there thinking, “I just won't be happy if I can't use both тире and дефисы in my e-mail and web compositions.” Ah, that kind of love of detail warms my heart. And I will warm your heart, dear reader, by pointing out that the “Russian for Gringos” keyboards allow you to use both with great ease; in Russian mode to get an em dash you simply hold down the ctrl key while simultaneously tapping the hyphen key. Without the ctrl key you get the regular hyphen.

Finally, if all this just feels way too complicated for you, you may simplify your life with a Russian computer keyboard for blondes.

Most qualitative adjectives that end in -ый can be turned into adverbs by dropping the last two letters of the nominative singular and then adding -о. The adjective интересный ‘interesting’ is no exception, thus интересно means ‘interestingly.’ Of course no one says ‘interestingly’ in English, but the Russians use интересно all the time:

What is really interesting is that Russians use this word where Americans use the phrase “I wonder?”

Галитоз is a medical term that means “bad breath.” You may recognize it as meaning the same thing as the English word halitosis. When Russians borrows words based on Latin and Greek roots or words, they usually remove any grammatical ending from the word. Other examples:

Normally when Russians talk about bad breath, they don't use the medical term. Even educated native speakers might not know it. Instead they say «У него плохо пахнет изо рта», which in a word for word paraphrase comes out “At him it smells bad from the mouth.” Sample sentences:

My favorite bad breath phrase in Russian is «У меня во рту как будто эскадрон ночевал» “It's like an [entire] company [of cavalry] spent the night in my mouth.” But that's not the only one. The Russians love to play with language, and they can get quite creative when describing bad breath, for instance…

Warning! The following example contains English vulgarity and русский мат!

There are a lot of versions of this phrase that vary in their degree of nastiness. I was curious which one was the most common, so I googled them all and came up with this hit count (15 May 2009):

Versions 1 and 2 are kiddie talk. Adults may use them to avoid obscenity. #3 uses a fairly neutral word but still gets the point across. 4 and 5 are obscene. Do NOT use them in front of your instructors in Moscow or in front of your host mother.

The proper word for photograph in Russian is фотография, a perfectly regular second-declension noun:

Here are some sample sentences:

But of course фотография is a long word. Brevity is the soul of wit. Can't we replace it with something shorter? You bet. The Russians have come up with фотка and фото. Both are quite informal. The former is a perfectly predictable word that declines just like взятка. The latter is an indeclinable noun:

English is interesting in terms of comparatives. Sometimes you can use a comparative with -er, but you can't use a comparative with “more.” Thus “cuter” is okay, but “more cute” is not. We call the -er form the simple comparative. Sometimes the “more” form is okay, but the “-er” form is not. Thus “My life is more interesting than yours” is okay, but “My life is interestinger than yours” is not. When you use “more” with an adjective, we call that the compound comparative. Russian also has both simple and compound comparatives. The word used for compound comparatives is более. The более form is almost always acceptable in Russian:

Note: Задача really means assignment or taks, but in certain contexts like арифметическаая задача it can mean the equivalent of equation. The normal word for equation is уравнение.

The word юбилей means anniversary, an entirely fitting word since today is the first anniversary of the existence of Russian Word of the Day. The word applies to birthdays, wedding anniversaries, the commemoration of revolutions, and the observance of pretty well any other notable event. It can also mean the party held on those days, and thus it may be translated as birthday party, anniversary party, or celebration. Here are some sample sentences:

For Russian Word of the Day this anniversary is a joy. Over the last year we have provided over two hundred fifty posts discussing Russian vocabulary. For us generally monolingual Americans, the success of such a blog suggests hope for the future. People who are willing to learn each others' languages and consider each others' points of view are the key to deepening our understanding of each other. With that goal in mind, let us all consciously adopt attitudes of lightness and humor toward ourselves at the same time as we adopt attitudes of curiosity and patience toward those we don't know.

Warmest wishes to all the children of Earth,

Donald E. Livingston, Jr.

Another word that means bigger is больше. In this meaning it is what we call a comparative adjective:

Just as with other comparative sentences, if чем is followed by a simple noun phrase in the nominative case, you can make an equivalent phrase without чем by putting the noun in the genitive. Thus the second and third sentences from above can be rephrased as:

One thing you can't do with больше is to make a sentence like “John lives in a bigger house than Victor.” When “bigger” directly modifies a noun, Russians have to use either «больший» or «более большой», thus:

Больше has other meanings as well. We will explore them over the next couple weekds.

Now here's a subtle detail of the Russian language. It's one that will trip you up at first when you start reading Russian if you aren't paying attention. Although большой means big, there is another word больший that means bigger, greater, or larger. Since Russians don't usually write stress marks, the presence of о or е after the ш is often the only written indication of which meaning is implied. Больший declines like this:

Sample sentences:

As part of your Russian reading strategy in your early years, you might want to pause when you come across большой and больший. If you spot a е after the ш, then remind yourself that it means “bigger.” That helps in the singular of most forms. Alas, only context can tell you which one the author had in mind in the plural.

The most common word for big or large in Russian is большой. Notice that it is an end-stressed adjective: end-stressed adjectives always end in -ой in the masculine nominative singular. It declines like this:

Sample sentences:

One phrase that the Russians use often is большие деньги, which word for word means “big money,” although it is often better translated as “a lot of money”:

One of the fun words that has developed in English over the last decade or two is “gynormous,” a combination of gigantic and enormous… in other words, really, really big. Russian has a similar word большущий, a combination of большой “big” and могущий “powerful,” which also means really, really big:

One last thing: it is easy to confuse the word большой with the word больший. They mean different things. We'll address the latter word tomorrow.

We previously discussed the word ещё, which by itself usually means still. When you combine it with кто or что, it ends up meaning “else”:

This use of ещё is also possible after other question words as well:

The verb “to look for” is искать. The verb doesn't have a proper perfective. If you want to say "to succesfully search out/to find” then you want находить/найти or отыскивать/отыскать.

The thing you look for appears in the accusative case:

Occasionally you will encounter sentences where the thing that is being looked for appears in the genitive case. That is okay if the thing is abstract like justice or beauty, but don't use that construction for a concrete object like a pen or a banana:

The basic verb in Russian that means “to eat” is есть/съесть. Notice that the second letter of the perfective forms is a hard sign, not a soft sign. This is one of the four most irregular verb stems in the language. (The others are the stems of дать, хотеть and бежать.)

There are a couple potentially confusing points here. Notice first of all that the imperfective infinitive is spelled the same as есть, that quirky present tense form of “to be” that appears in “there is/are” and “have” sentences.

The next trick is that есть is actually pronounced differently from ест. In both words the first sound is a y sound as in yes, but the vowel quality is different:

Here are a couple sentences where you can hear the difference:

As to the grammar of the verb, the thing that you eat shows up in the accusative case:

In English we often say things like “I ate breakfast/lunch/dinner,” and in Russian theoretically it's grammatical to say things like «Я (съ)ел завтрак/обед/ужин.» But frankly the Russians rarely say that. Instead they subsitute the verbs that directly address those meals: «Мы (по)завтракалали/(по)обедали/(по)ужинали».

* The careful student may notice that in this sentence the accusative plural акриды copies the nominative plural, which is atypical for modern Russian. Animate accusative plurals did not always automatically copy the genitive. This change began hundreds of years ago with words referring to male human beings, and then it eventually spread to other noun classes. That process is nearly complete in modern Russian, although there are still a few constructions where animate nouns sometimes occur in the accusative plural in a form that copies the nominative.

The Russian word for textbook is учебник. If you want to specify the subject that a textbook deals with, you have two grammatical options. The first is to put the subject of the textbook in the genitive case after the noun:

The next option is to put the subject of the textbook in the dative case after the preposition по:

The words спех and спешка are nouns that mean “a hurry, a rush.” They are conversational words; you wouldn't write them in a formal paper. The former is particularly used in combination with the preposition к to mean “to be in a rush/hurry (to get something, to get something done).” The person who feels the haste is expressed in the dative:

Спешка is mostly used in the prepositional case after в:

The Russian word for forehead is лоб. The о is a fleeting vowel, which means that any time you add a grammatical ending to the noun, the о drops out. Notice also that the word distinguishes a locative form «на лбу» “on the forehead” from the prepositional form «о лбе» “about the forehead.”

Of course, in that last example they have in mind a statue of Lenin, not Lenin's embalmed body.

There is a phrase «как на лбу написано» “like it was written on the forehead” that the Russians use to catch the idea that something was obvious by the expression of a person's face.

Have you ever wondered where the word muscle comes from? It's from Latin. In Latin mūs means mouse. The suffix -culus is a diminutive suffix. Thus mūsculus means “little mouse,” which kind of makes sense since if you look at a muscle moving on your body, it kind of looks like some critter is scurrying under your skin. In Russian the root мыш- means mouse. The suffix -ца is a diminutive suffix. One of the words for muscle in Russian is мышца. When you take the roots and suffixes of a word in one language, and you substitute the roots and suffixes of another language to make a new word in that language, we call that word a calque. Мышца is a Russian calque from a Latin word. Interestingly enough, something similar happens in Polish. The Polish root for mouse is myš-, and -ca is a diminutive suffix. The Polish word myšca is also a calque from Latin and means muscle. Here are some sample sentences:

Подмышка is a fun word. The prefix под- means under, and the root мыш- means mouse. Thus подмышка means armpit, and doesn't that little bit of hair under your arm kind of look like a mouse? Sample sentences:

¹ From the movie “Flirting with Disaster.”

Мышь also means mouse in the sense of a computer mouse. There are a lot of different kinds of mouses (mice?) out there, including:

When you talk about pressing a mouse button, a variety of verbs are used: нажимать/нажать “to press,” кликать/кликнуть “to click,” щелкать/щелкнуть “to click.” Sample sentences:

¹ Examples adapted from this source.

The Russian word for mouse is мышь. It is a third declension feminine noun that declines like this:

Sample sentences:

¹ Apparently this superstition was held in English speaking countries as well:

A flayne Mouse rosted, or made in powder, & drunk at one tyme, doeth perfectly helpe such as can not holde or keepe their water: especially, if it be used three dayes in this order. This is verie true and often proued.

From Lupton's “Thousand notable things,” quoted in A Dictionary of Superstitions.