Russian Word of the Day

Previously we discussed the word улыбка and how Americans and Russians perceive smiles differently. This last month I have seen once again how this affects us. On this occasion it was a comment made by a Russian woman of my acquaintance working at a major university in the US. She said:

She was suffering from profound culture shock, and part of that shock was due to her inability to process the American smile. Despite the fact that intellectually she knew an American smile meant something different than a Russian smile, her emotions still tried to perceive those smiles as if they were Russian smiles. Having known her for a while, I suspect that she will eventually return to Russia, embittered and depressed, convinced that Americans are terrible human beings. Alas, she will also return ignorant, completely misunderstanding what she was seeing.

I always teach my American students how to interpret the lack of smiling in Russia. Today I'd like to suggest to Russians what they need to understand about American smiles. Probably the most important thing for a Russian to realize is this: whereas Russian smiles are mostly meant to convey joy, American smiles have several other uses.

1. If you are in a store, when you walk up to the cashier, the cashier will probably smile at you. In this context, the smile means “I am ready to deal with your purchase.” This is not an insincere smile. The cashier is really ready to deal with your purchase. If you think, “The cashier is smiling because he/she wants to be my friend” or “The cashier thinks I'm sexy,” then you will most likely be mistaken. The cashier smiles that way at two hundred people a day and for the most part does not want to establish a new and lasting friendship with those people. For the most part the cashier does not think those customers are sexy. The cashier is ready to deal with each of their purchases. That's the purpose of the smile, and in that context it is sincere. The smile means: “I am ready to deal with your purchase.”

2. If you have an American acquaintance who is dealing with grief or illness or pain, and if you go to visit that acquaintance, he/she will probably smile at you when first seeing you. This smile can mean either a) that your acquaintance is happy to see you, or b) that your acquaintance is ready to pay polite attention to you despite the miserable circumstances. In the first instance, the acquaintance is sincerely happy to see you. In the second, the acquaintance is sincerely ready to be polite. The trouble for a Russian here is that Russians may assume that the politeness is an insincere attempt to be friendly or an insincere attempt to pretend that everything is okay. That would be a mistake. Most Americans sincerely want to be considerate and reasonable even to people they do not know, even in the midst of grief or pain. It is a sincere desire. But to assume that (b) means (a) would be a profound error.

3. If you work with Americans, then most every time you see your American colleagues, they will smile at you. In this context the smile means that the American is ready to go through the initial greeting ritual and then get down to work. Most of the time the smile does not mean that the American wants to deepen his relationship with you. About the greeting ritual… when Americans meet each other, they expect to go through the greeing ritual, which may take four to six sentences. They say “Hello, how are you?” The expected response is something like “Doing fine, thanks. You?” Do not give a negative response in this context unless a) there is something wrong that may inhibit the business you are there to discuss, or b) you are in such emotional distress that you really need the listeners to set aside the business for the moment to deal with your crisis. Generally, do not choose (b). Americans consider it childish, immature, unprofessional or simply tacky to bring personal emotions or relationships into the workplace.

Once again, a Russian may perceive an American smile in that context to be insincere. That's a mistake. The American sincerely wants to get down to business and sincerely wants to verify that there is no hindrance to that. If a Russian thinks “This smile means that my colleagues want to hear me detail my personal feelings right now,” then the Russian misunderstands the intent and the sincerity of the smile.

4. When walking down the street in the US, a Russian may meet the eyes of a stranger, and then the stranger smiles. This does not mean that the American wants to be the Russian's friend. If someone meets my eyes while walking down the street in the US and does not smile, I become immediately uncomfortable and wonder if the person has something against me. If the person smiles, then I assume the person is not hostile. That's right: the generic meaning of the American smile is “I am not currently disposed to be hostile toward you.” When the stranger smiles that smile, he is sincerely expressing the idea that he is not hostile toward you. The smile is sincere. The message it sends is sincere. But it is not the same message intended by a Russian smile.

Please bear in mind that whenever you meet someone from another culture, they have a completely different set of emotional cues. The things that they use to signal happiness, sadness, embarrassment, irritation or anger—that is, their facial expressions, tones of voice, and body language—are different than what you are used to. And all those things are processed by us mostly unconsciously. Thus it is very easy for us to completely misunderstand the intent of a foreigner, even after years of knowing them or their language or their culture. So when dealing with foreigners, always use your mind to step back from your initial reactions and consider whether your emotions might be misperceiving the foreigner's sincere intent.

I have just arrived in Kazan for the summer; in Russian the city is spelled Казань, which is a third-declension feminine noun:

Казань is located about 450 miles east of Moscow, in a political subunit of Russia called Tatarstan:

The other day I came across an intriguing quote in a blog entry on Irish English:

Another interesting influence from Irish is its absolute lack of the words yes or no, so when our ancestors were speaking English as a second language, they would translate how they would use such words originally in Irish.

Although international English influences mean young people do this way less nowadays, a lot of us Irish still simply don’t use these words. In the Irish language (and in other languages like Thai for example), this issue is resolved by simply repeating the verb of the question. Can you swim? I can! Do you like tomato juice? I don’t. Are you coming? I amn’t.

Yes you read that right: amn’t. This is one I’m surprised other English speakers don’t use! You say isn’t, don’t, aren’t… It’s logical if you ask me!

The Russians can do precisely the same thing. Instead of answering yes to a yes-no question, they can simply repeat the verb. Instead of saying no, they repeat the verb with не in front of it. I generally prefer to translate this construction with phrases like do/don't , was/wasn't, have/haven't:

This phrases can be preceded by да and нет as well:

Sometimes this response can seem very curt, if not downright rude, to the American ear. I once had the following conversation with a woman passer-by in Russia:

At first I was offended. But then my ratiocination kicked in and I reminded my emotional self that Russian intonation that seems rude to the American ear is often perfectly polite in Russia, and that Russian grammatical constructions don't necessarily have the same emotional content as parallel English structures. I asked a couple Russian teachers about it and was told that for many speakers of Russian this standard response pattern is perfectly normal and doesn't imply irritation or hostility.

PS. I have never seen this verbal response pattern given an official name in the academic literature of Russian. I propose “bipolar verbal response pattern.” How's that for academese?

Let's say a first year Russian student wants to know how to say “paragraph.” He looks it up in the dictionary (and then does some reverse dictionary sleuthing) and finds that the word абзац means “indentation,” that bit of space that one leaves at the beginning of a paragraph before the first letter. Thus a paragraph that begins «с абзаца» “with an indentation” (lit. “from an indentation”) will look like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

From that meaning, the word абзац extends to mean the space between two such indents, in other words, a paragraph:

Another phrase for indentation is красная строка. Красная in this context has nothing to with the color red, but rather with the old fashioned meanings of красный, which sometimes had the sense of beautiful, special or honorable:

Having now studied twelve languages, I can tell you with complete confidence that none has profanity as astonishing as Russian profanity. Seriously. The creativity, eloquence and vile vigor of Russian cussing is simply mind-boggling. English profanity is like baby-talk compared to Russian. The word that names the system of Russian profanity is мат. Notice that there is no soft-sign at the end of the word. Despite the superficial resemblance to the word for mother, you must never use мат around your Russian мать. She will slap your face so fast, you won't know what hit you.

In the US you can often hear English curse words in casual conversations on the street. In Russia there is still a wide gap between people who regularly use мат and people who don't. Those who use it, use it like crazy. Most everybody else hardly ever uses it. Not too surprisingly, factory workers and peasants are more likely to use it than highly educated folks. I was much amused to read about an ice cream factory in Barnaul where the management got so tired of the workers' vulgarity that they issued an official dictionary to help the workers translate their normal curse-laden expressions into polite literary Russian. I can tell, dear reader, that you are consumed with curiosity about this dictionary, so a bit of it is reproduced below.

Warning! The material below contains offensive Russian and English profanity!

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Концерт is the Russian word for concert. In terms of declension it is a perfectly regular noun, but bear in mind that it is a на word: when you talk about going to or being at a concert, you must use the preposition на instead of в, and when returning from a concert you must use the preposition с:

The most common words for blouse in Russian are кофта and блузка. The former is a perfectly second-declension noun, and the latter is affected by a spelling rule and has a fill vowel in the genitive plural:

Some sample sentences:

Russian Wikipedia makes the following statement:

I suppose theoretically that might be the case, but nowadays кофта is used fairly generically for a woman's top in casual conversation and is essentially the same thing as блузка. (Do a quick search for the word on images.google.com if you don't believe me.)

Last week when I googled кофта, I came across a slightly vulgar Russian poem about a blouse that had me rolling on the floor laughing my academic credentials off. It suddenly struck me that it would be a great opportunity for a little translation practice… or better yet, a translation contest! I quickly threw together an English version just to be sure it could be done effectively: yes, it can. So here we go:

Translation contest and rules

• Translate the poem into English.
• E-mail it to me using the contact link at the bottom of this page.
• All entries received by 11:59 p.m. on May 28th, 2010 will be considered.
• I will send $10 by regular mail to the person who sent me the version I judge to be the best translation.
• People from all countries are welcome to apply as long as you have a postal address to which I can send the $10 if you win.
• All entries will be posted to the web the first week of June so readers can compare translation tactics.

My grandmother used to have a big box of jewelry. It was always carefully placed on the second shelf of her armoire. When I was little, I loved playing with it, pretending I was an exotic princess. I have no idea why my grandmother trusted me with her little treasure box. Frankly, if I were her, I’d think a dozen times before letting me play with it; the fact that I never lost any of it could only be pure luck. There were so many nice, almost antique, pieces in there: earrings, rings, bracelets and beads. But what I liked the most was a tiny pendant with a blue rock and a golden setting. There was something so exquisite about it, my inner princess simply had to have it! After my grandmother passed away, my mom kept the jewelry box. I am not even sure what happened to it after we moved to the US. I have been trying to find a picture similar to the pendant I remember. The picture above somewhat resembles it but certainly doesn’t do it true justice.

In Russian a pendant is кулон, which is a noun of masculine gender. Its diminutive is кулончик. In fact, if I were to talk about my grandmother’s pendant in Russian, I would most likely use кулончик to emphasize its small size as well as its fragility.

Sometimes the Russian word каждый ‘every’ has an interesting interaction with the preposition по + dative singular. In effect, the по means ‘apiece’ or ‘each’. We call this the ‘distributive’ meaning of по:

Of course, in those contexts the каждый is redundant, so the sentence can be said the same way without it, in which case the people to whom things are given will most likely be expressed in the plural:

Oddly enough, if the number of things issued to the recipients is more than one, then the number phrase is accusative instead of dative:

The spring semester is about to end; many are about to graduate. This time I am amongst these “many” (Yay! ). After years of hard studying, staying up till the wee hours, trying to cram for a test, I will finally have my degree! I will move on from solving math problems to completing other important tasks and objectives posed in life.

Conveniently enough, in Russian a math problem and any sort of task or objective is just one word, задача. It is a noun of feminine gender; its diminutive is задачка.

Because in English “problem” both means math exercise and trouble, I would imagine that English speakers might confuse the meanings of these words in Russian. For example, when talking about solving a physics problem, you don’t want to use “решить проблему” because in Russian проблема has only one meaning – trouble; so your question would mean to "resolve a problem". Therefore, if you want to ask your classmates if they finished their assigned math problems, you should use the word задача.

The standard Russian word for yes is да and for no — нет. For the most part they work pretty much like we would expect:

Russian sometimes doesn't work quite the way we would expect, though, when answering a question that has не in it. Remember that не is often including in Russian questions to make the question softer, more polite. But if the question is in the negative in Russian, there must be a negative somewhere in the answer as well. Let's say you are in Russia waiting outside the subway station for a woman named Tanya. You've never met Tanya; your friends have arranged the meeting, and you have only a general description of her. You spot someone who sort of matches the description, so you walk up to her and say:

In such a case, when the woman says нет, she is negating the idea of being Tanya. That interchange makes perfect sense to the American ear. Now consider this version:

In this case when the woman answers да, she is confirming your spoken negative supposition that she is not Tanya. Notice that despite the да in the original, it sounds better to have no in the English translation. (An English speaker would never say “Yes, I'm not Tanya” in this context.)

If the woman turns to be Tanya, then the question can be answered like this:

In this case Tanya is denying your stated assumption that she is not Tanya, so she answers нет and then corrects you. Notice once again that word for word translation “No, I am Tanya” simply doesn't work in English.

Let's see a few more examples and note their translations carefully. Let's say you need to ask a Russian whether she speaks English. It may turn out like these examples:

Notice this carefully: although very often да and нет correspond to English yes and no, sometimes the grammar of responding to a question requires a negative in Russian where it makes no sense in English. A professional translation in such a context requires replacing нет with yes in English. People with limited language experience might think “That's a bad translation or a dishonest translation because it says the opposite of what the words actually say.” They would be mistaken. Sometimes what appears to be an opposite translation is in fact the best translation, as long as it communicates the original intent and informational content of the source sentence.

The word вот means ‘here’ in the sense of “here it is” or “here they are.” Very often you find it used in very short sentences:

Of course, it's possible to add modifiers and clauses to make the sentences longer:

Beginners are sometimes confused about when to use вот and when to use здесь/тут. The primary difference is that вот is only used when you are actively pointing out something or someone; in other words, you are usually either gesturing with your hand or nodding toward the item with your head or glancing toward it with your eyes. Тут and здесь can be used without actually pointing out the item. Thus if you are asking the question whether an item is currently present, you use тут/здесь, not вот:

Of course, if you point out the person in your answer, you can use вот in the answer, but you still won't use it in the question:

The Russian word for every is каждый. In terms of its endings it is a simple adjective that agrees with its noun in case, number, and gender:

The word каждый is often used in time phrases like every day, every month, every year. If it modifies a masculine noun, you might think that it is used in the nominative case, but once you see it with a feminine noun, you realize that those time phrases are in the accusative case:

If the accusative number phrase has a number in it, then каждый comes before it in the plural:

Weakness, cough and stuffed nose - we all have experienced these symptoms of the common cold. It ruins your plans and makes it so hard to get out of bed in the morning. Unfortunately, I feel very closely connected to today’s word right now. I cannot wait to get over it!

In Russian, the common cold is called простуда. It is a noun of feminine gender.

The adjective formed from простуда is простуженный.

There are different methods of treating a cold. I can think of a few now that I remember from my childhood. I think the worst one had to do with garlic and onions. First, naturally, you had to eat a lot of garlic and then hold your head above a pot with fresh cut onions and breathe it in. After that the cold would most likely still be there for a few days, but all self-respecting people and/or vampires would choose to stay away...

Here's a cute cartoon that shows other methods we treat the common cold with.

We previously discussed the word ночь, which means night in the sense of the time between midnight and roughly fourin the morning. To say something happens during that period, you put ночь into the instrumental case.

Since in English we usually call that period of time “early morning,” that leads to some curious translations. Notice how «поздно ночью», which literally means “late at night,” is best translated as “early in the morning”:

The Russian word for night is ночь. You may remember that the Spanish word for night is noche, which might lead you to wonder whether Spanish borrowed it from Russian or vice-versa. The answer is neither. Russian ночь and Spanish noche are cognates. In historical linguistics ‘cognates’ are words that descended from the same source many years ago, and due to the fact that they have a common ancestor, they still have a resemblance to each other.¹ Thus German nacht and English night are also cognates with Russian ночь because they are all descended from the same Proto-Indo-European word.

Ночь is a third-declension noun, which means it declines like this:

Many of the uses of ночь are similar to the use of night in English:

The most famous nights of Russia are the white nights белые ночи. Officially Moscow and Petersburg are too far south to have proper white nights, but during the two weeks on either side of the summer solstice Petersburg's nights are very white indeed, and the city hosts a world-famous celebration that attracts artists and celebrants from all over the world:

When discussing time by the clock, there is a difference between Russian and English. In English night is sometimes conceived of as the time between sundown and midnight. In Russian ‘night’ is the time between midnight and roughly 4:00 a.m. So instead of saying “3:00 in the morning” the Russians say “3:00 at night”:

Thus:

¹ Outside of historical linguistics sometimes people use ‘cognate’ to mean a word that is superficially similar to another word in both sound and meaning. In that sense English television and Spanish televisión may be called cognates, but that's a sloppy use of the word. In all likelihood the Spanish word is a direct borrowing from French or English.

² There is some variation here. Some people will say четыре часа ночи. I wouldn't be surprised if the time of year actually affects this as well, with more people saying утра in the summer when it gets light earlier, and ночи in the winter when it stays dark later. A quick Google search also shows variation with five a.m.

We are all different in so many ways with different desires and aspirations. However, we have one sure thing in common: we all dream. Sometimes our dreams are all that gets us by on a grueling school or monotonous work day. It is the thought that we’ll get what we want, that the world will change for the better and that with that change we will finally be happy.

A dream in Russian is мечта. It is a noun of feminine gender. At first glance, this word is simple and unpretentious. However, there are some things about it that are not so typical. Sometimes in classic literature мечта is used as ghost or vision, which is uncertain and unclear by its nature, just like a dream itself.

The second interesting thing about this word is that it seems to be missing its genitive plural form in modern Russian.

The only way to say it would be мечт. Even though it was previously used, it sounds wrong and archaic nowadays. It could still be used in speech but more often than not in a playful-ironic sense. Therefore, instead, we usually use мечтаний. This word, мечтание essentially means the same but has the missing genitive plural form.

Here is silly cartoon about мечта.

I believe there are always ways to make things better. We always get what we want sooner or later, this way or the other… as long as we never stop dreaming!

I don’t like most horror movies. There is always a naïve dummy being led into the hands of an evil master, who is driven by his utter insanity or various psychological issues. All this blood spill doesn’t do anything for me except for giving me an uneasy feeling in my stomach. Personally, I prefer suspense. I like that little chill and goose bumps you get when thinking “Can this really be possible?”

In Russian the goose bumps are called «гусиная кожа» “goose skin.” However, a more folksy word is мурашки.

The reason мурашки is used to describe this feeling is because this is also a word for ants or other little insects. Therefore, «мурашки по коже побежали», “ants ran on the skin” is probably one of the most used expressions to describe goose bumps along with the feeling causing them. (Insects running on your skin… mmmagical feeling… Gross!)

I am not sure what the context should be but I suppose you one could talk about a singular goose bump, мурашка, even though it is usually seen in its plural form. However, мурашка can definitely be used when talking about an ant.

Just like in English, you can get мурашки from being cold or overcome by feelings, either positive or negative.

The Russian word for mercury, the element, is ртуть, which is a feminine third-declension noun. The word mostly occurs in the singular:

Image from Wikipedia

The place most of us used to encounter mercury was in thermometers:

Nowadays mercury thermometers are being replaced by digital thermometers that have no mercury, so we mostly encounter the word in high school chemistry classes in the periodic table of the elements. Its symbol is Hg, which is taken from the Latin word Hydrargyrum, which is based on the Greek roots ὑδρ- ‘water’ and ἀργυρ- ‘silver’:

I remember allowing a small quantity of mercury to roll around in my hand as a kid. Despite how beautiful it was, that really wasn't a good idea:

By the way, if you are in the mood to explore the elements in Russian, there is a marvelous interactive periodic table of the elements available at chem.50webs.com

With a bit of practice the beginning Russian student begins to recognize when a Russian word may have been borrowed from another language. For instance, кв- often corresponds to qu- in English; thus кварц means quartz. Or English th- sometimes corresponds to Russian т-; thus thesis becomes тезис. So when a student spots the word геркулес, he may recognize that г- corresponds to h- and immediately assume that it refers to Hercules, the Greek god. Imagine his shock, then, upon learning that the most common usage of the word is for oatmeal, the breakfast cereal. That's right: герукулес means limp, sticky oat flakes:

Геркулес was originally a Soviet brand name for oatmeal, though nowadays it is used of oatmeal generically. Why would oatmeal be connected with the image of the Greek who was famed for his strength? There is a cultural reason, actually:

In the US we generally prepare oatmeal in boiling water with a bit of salt added. Once it is in the bowl in front of us, we often add a bit of milk or sugar or a handful or raisins. In Russia the oats are often boiled up in water or milk with a simply astonishing quantity of sugar mixed in. And then comes the best part... the Russians then slice off an enormous chunk of butter and drop it on top of the oatmeal. The residual heat melts the better into a glorious golden pool that stretches across the entire bowl, and every single spoonful delivers the marvelous buttery taste. You can literally feel your carotid artery clogging with every heavenly spoonful.

(BTW, the idea that butter clogs your arteries is of course a complete falsehood propagated by the CIA to rob us of the joy in our lives. All educated people know that butter lubricates the veins and arteries and makes the blood flow more smoothly...)

Finally we should mention that although you will find the Greek hero's name occasionally spelled Геркулес in Russian (from the Latin version), but you also find Геракл (from the Greek version). Since Hercules is one of the most commonly depicted Greek personages, below you will see one of the most famous Hercules statues in Russia. It is on the grounds of the Summer Palace, which was built mostly by the empresses Elizabeth the first and Catherine the second. The palace is located a short distance from St. Petersburg in a town called Pushkin, formerly Царское село. The statue is a copy of the famous Farnese Hercules. Wow. Those Russian empresses liked their men beefy. I guess Hercules must have eaten a lot of геркулес...

Let's say a young Russian student is composing an essay and decides to write “I want to earn a billion dollars” in Russian. He knows the word for million is миллион, so he figures a billion must be биллион, but, being an enterprising student, he quickly double-checks his Russian dictionary. He is pleased to note that the word is exactly as he expected, so he writes «Я хочу заработать биллион долларов.» Alas, he has made an error. Even though you can find the word биллион in Russian dictionaries, people rarely use it. Instead they say миллиард:

If you are translating from English to Russian, you must be quite careful if the source document has the word billion in it. In the US the word billion always means 1,000,000,000. That's not necessarily true in other English-speaking countries. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England the word meant 1,000,000,000,000. (In the States we call that a trillion). The US system is known as the “short scale” system of naming numbers, and the old British version is known as the “long scale.” In 1974 the UK officially switched from long scale to short scale, but there are still people in Britain who use the word the other way. That means that a good translator will take the time to determine the nationality of the author and the country in which the source was published before he finalizes his translation, and even then it's a good idea to see if the source document has some internal confirmation of which meaning is intended.

Recently we discussed the noun tan; now, I would like to continue on the topic and discuss the usage of the verb "to tan".

In Russian the imperfective and perfective forms are the following: загорать and загореть.

Personally, I always try to be careful with tanning. I can only remember a few times in my life that I've gotten badly sunburned. However, as we say in Russian, it was редко, да метко, "rarely but to the point". Every single time it happened, it was a handful. One summer, I remember, I was reading outside; the sun wasn't even out - it was cloudy! Nevertheless, I got burned so badly, I couldn't sleep the following night! What can I say? Just my luck!