Russian Word of the Day

The most common Russian word for five is пять, which declines like this:

When пять occurs in oblique cases (oblique means a case other than nominative or accusative), it works pretty well like we would expect from a theoretical point of view; that is, it declines as we would expect and the noun it quantifies shows up in the same case in the plural:

Now here's the weird part... If пять is part of a nominative case number phrase or an accusative case number phrase, then the noun it quantifies shows up in the genitive plural:

I know, I know. You are wondering why. The answer of course is that the Russians do this for security purposes: by making the language complicated, it's easier to identify foreign spies...

Note: америкос is a mildly condescending word for Americans.

Nowadays everyone seems to have a flash drive to transfer files from one computer to another. You stick it in a USB port on your laptop and —bang!— you're in business. The most common Russian word for flash drive is флешка. Even though the third letter is е, the л is pronounced hard. It declines like this:

When you copy a file to/from a flash drive, you can use quite a few verbs, including скачивать/скачать, копировать/скопировать and скидывать/скинуть. You copy to a флешка using на + accusative:

If you copy from a флешка, you use с + genitive:

One of the most useful words in the English language is whatchamacallit. We use it to indicate an object whose name we've forgotten. For instance, let's say you and your sister are in the kitchen and you can't remember the word collander but you need it. You could say to her “Hand me that whatchamacallit. You know, that thing to drain the pasta with.” Or you are working on your car with your brother and you can't remember “feeler gauge,” then gesturing toward the toolbox you might have this conversation:

There are a lot of variations on that word. For instance,

The phrase that the Russians use for whatchamacallit is «вот это самое». Let's say two Russians are in the kitchen and can't remember the word дуршлаг. They might have this conversation:

Or two Russians are working on the car:

The verb выступать/выступить gets a lot of use in Russian. One of its meanings is “to appear in a public place for the purpose of performing or making a public statement”. It conjugates like this:

Although its forms are regular, the verb itself causes some difficulty in translation because of the noun that often accompanies it after the preposition ‘с’ in the instrumental case. For instance «выступить с речью» word for word means “to appear with a speech,” which sounds quite unnatural in English. Instead we will usually say “to deliver a speech” or “to give a speech.” At a circus performance «выступить с номером» means “to perform an act.” At a kindergarten show “выступить с песней” would be translated “to perform a song” or “to sing a song.”

We previously noted the use of the word чтобы in sentences like this where someone in the first clause wants someone else in the second clause to do something.

The translation of such sentences into English is fairly straightforward. But sometimes a person in the first clause wants someone else in the first clause to get a third person in the second clause to do something. Hm. That was not the clearest statement, was it? An example is in order:

Пётр говорит Тане, чтобы её подруга позвонила вечером.

Here Pyotr is talking to Tanya with the purpose of getting Tanya's friend to call in the evening. Now just how are we supposed to translate that? We are going to have to add some words in the English translation to get it to flow better. After some reflection I have decided that you need either a “to have” construction or a “should” construction:

Pyotr is telling Tanya to have her friend call in the evening.
Pyotr is telling Tanya that her friend should call in the evening.

Here are five more examples:

On the whole I like the “to have” translations better than the “should” translations. In either case there is a bit of ambiguity. The “to have” construction in such contexts can express either a suggestion or a command. In other words “Misha told Pyotr to have Arkadi give him a call” can mean either that Misha is making a suggestion for Pyotr to call Arkdai, or it can be taken as a command, i.e., Misha is telling Pyotr to do it.

The “should” construction in such contexts can express either a suggestion or a statement of moral obligation. In other words “Misha told Pyotr that Arkadi should give him a call” can mean either that Misha is making a suggestion or that Misha is saying Arkadi has a moral obligation to call.

The Russian чтобы clauses in these context better match the “to have” range of meaning than the “should” range of meaning.

All the Russian examples here are from p. 140 of “Russian Stage 2: Welcome Back!” by Irina Dolgova and Cynthia Martin. The suggestions for English translations are my own, so any errors must be blamed on me, not them.

The Russian word for a verse in a poem is стих, but it gets a lot more use in Russian than in English. First we'll look at its forms, and then we'll discuss why it is used so much in Russia. It is an end-stressed noun, which means whenever you add a grammatical ending to it, the first syllable of the grammatical ending gets the stress.

The word can mean either a verse in a poem or a verse in the Bible:

The word стих doubles as meaning a poem, so a parent might a Russian schoolchild to recite a poem like this:

Every American child knows the poem/riddle “Humpty-Dumpty,” and every Russian child knows this poem (which is also sung as a New Year's song):

The plural стихи is used to mean poetry in general:

* Notice the atypical stress. Normally it should be родилась.

We previously noted the use of the word чтобы in sentences like:

In the Russian version of that sentence the чтобы clause contains a perfective verb to express a one-time action with result to the point of discourse:

That's all well and good, but what happens if the opposite is the case? In other words, we want to say:

In this case the verb in the чтобы clause must be expressed in the imperfective:

Alternatively, one could put the не right in front of писала instead of in front of хочу:

For beginners the rule of thumb is this: a negated verb will be expressed in the imperfective. In these sentences the scope of negation seems to include not only хочу but also the complement of хочу, i.e. the чтобы clause. Here are some other examples. Notice all the sentences in blue have a perfective чтобы clause. All the sentences in yellow are negative and thus must have an imperfective чтобы clause:

One Russian root word for navel is пуп. That's enough to make any American laugh. And most of us will be so amused that we aren't going to bother to investigate the word further. But here at Russian Word of the Day we pride ourselves on taking interest in all sorts of things that other people simply ignore, and today the belly button is it. It is an end-stressed noun, so it declines like this:

I know, I know: the dative singular made you laugh again.

Anyhoo, пуп is etymologically the source word for navel, one that you will find once in a blue moon in a formal, scientific, or medical context. Thus Russian Wikipedia gives us this info:

But when talking about a person's belly button, the Russians almost never say пуп. Instead they use the end-stressed diminutive пупок.

Sometimes you see belly dancers in movies and you can see their navels, but my mother, who used to take belly dancing classes, tells me that that is a no-no:

Every five or ten years I get into a conversation about the lint that can show up in one's belly button. It seems to be a gender based issue: men have it happen more often than women. Тhe subject was even brought up recently on the web:

One of the amazing things about Russian is that you can make a diminutive of a diminutive, so the dimiminutive of the diminutive пупок is — are you ready for the? — пупочек. This one turns out to be stem stressed:

The word is mostly used to refer to a baby's belly button. There is a bit of a gender difference in the use of this word. Adult men will rarely use it. Mothers and grandmothers will use it more often. (I actually had one Russian man tell me no one used it, but that's simply not true.) For instance, on babyblog.ru I found this little gem:

And as long as we are talking about belly buttons, we should mention the English word omphaloskepsis, which is meditation using the belly button as a focus. That's got nothing to do with Russian. I just really like the word.

Consider the following two sentences in English:

Both sentences use an infinitive construction in the second part of the sentence. If the implied subject in the second part is the same as the subject in the first part, the subject is not repeated in the second part. If the subject in the second part is different from the subject in the first part, it is specified in the second part. Russian uses an infinitive construction for sentences like #1, but it uses чтобы + past tense for sentences like #2:

This чтобы + past tense construction is sometimes referred to as the “subjunctive mood” because it is equivalent to similar subjunctive uses in Spanish, French, German, and some other languages. It is used not only with the verb хотеть “to want,” but also with many other verbs where one person ask/tell/order another person to do something, especially просить/попросить to request/ask, говорить/сказать to tell, приказывать/приказать to order, and прелагать/предложить to suggest.

One of the uses of the word чтобы is to indicate the purpose for which an object or action is designated. It is often translated into English as “to” or “so that”:

Notice that in those sentences чтобы was followed by an infinitive phrase. That's not always the case:

So what's the difference? The difference is who the “doer” is in the чтобы portion of the sentence. If the doer implied by the чтобы portion is the same as the doer in the main clause, then it is followed by an infinitive. If the doer is different, then you use чтобы to introduce a clause with a past tense verb. Note, however, that even though the form of the verb is past tense, the meaning is not necessarily past tense. It's just indicating the purpose of the action. Here are a couple more examples.

Буква means letter, as in a letter of the alphabet, not a letter you get in the mail. It's a perfectly regular feminine noun. When you talk about how many letters are in the English alphabet, there is a consensus that the alphabet consists of twenty-six letters. For Russian the situation is slightly hazier, since over the last hundred years sometimes ё is considered a variation of the letter е, and sometimes it's considered a separate letter. The current standards consider them separate letters, so it's educated nowadays to say that the Russian alphabet has thirty-three letters.

Because we English speakers were taught to worry about spelling, we always wonder how to say that a word is written with a particular letter. In that context Russians do not use the preposition «с», but rather «через» followed by the accusative case:

Of course we also need to know how to say capital letter прописная буква and lower-case letter (small letter) строчная буква. (Aren't you glad you studied a language where each letter has only two forms as opposed to, say, Arabic, where letters can have an initial, medial and final form?)

Notice that in this context the preposition с is used with the genitive case. I think that's because the Russians conceive of it as starting from a particular letter, not with a particular letter.

Today we will talk about another use of по, and this one is a weird one. When you express the idea of giving each individual in a group of people the same quantity of something, you express that quantity after the preposition по. In English we express the idea with the words each or apiece:

You will notice that in those sentences the dative case was used after по. You are probably thinking, “No problem. I'll just memorize that по in the distributive sense is used with the dative.” You poor sucker. The Russian language is about to kick you in the teeth. Consider the following sentences:

Pop quiz: what case is used after по when more than one object is distributed? Since два щенка and две кошки occur after по, any normal human being would say that it is the nominative case. There was an old assumption, however, that no preposition can govern the nominative case, which is mostly true in Indoeuropean languages. To be frank, the issue is complicated for reasons that are beyond the goals of this blog. The practical answer is this: when a number other than one is used after по, the number is in the nominative case. The noun that number quantifies shows up in the genitive singular if the number is полтора/ы, два/е, три or четыре, and in the genitive plural for other numbers. So here is a rule of thumb for first- and second-year Russian students:

Distributive по: uses the dative case when talking about a single item; uses nominative case of numbers other than one.

If you want to pursue the question of what the case actually is that по governs, start with Igor Melchuk's excellent book ... Melchuk is a grammatical god to whom I have erected a shrine (along with his publisher... ) in my home. I make a small offering to them every day in a brass bowl. The fire is fueled by pages ripped from People Magazine, which richly deserves to be burned, and the sacrifice is made of my own blood and hair, accompanied by me singing «Я хочу быть с тобой» by Nautilus Pompilius.