Peculiarities of the Russian Language

Another Russian folktale, this one alleging to report actual facts about a historical personage, may give a hint as to why there are a lot more Russian women wanting to marry American men, than American women wanting to marry Russian men.

Stepin Razin (pronounced RAH-zin; he was not a dried grape) was a famous Cossack bandit leader, who did much of his travelling and raiding by river. The story is that Razin married a young woman, and brought his new bride on board a large boat bound for his headquarters on a river island. As the Cossacks rowed the boat, some of them were muttering and complaining that having a bride was going to make their leader less enthusiastic about drinking and plundering with them. So, to mollify his precious thugs, Razin picked up his bride and threw her into the water to drown, just like that, proving that he knew "what really counted."

But never fear, the Russian culture does not ONLY treat women with brutality; men can be oppressed and murdered also! For many generations, the Russian armed forces have had a charming custom called "DEDOVSHCHINA," which can be translated as "The Grandfather System." This means that, as new recruits arrive at military units, every man senior in service to them--even if not higher in literal rank--is allowed to bully, enslave, and even assault them. Nothing inflicted on "plebes" in American service academies comes within a thousand miles of "DEDOVSHCHINA."

Such human-rights activists as have managed to remain unimprisoned in Putin's Russia have had their hands full trying to document all the cases in which longer-in-service enlisted men, sergeants, and even officers have _murdered_ young recruits, essentially for the fun of it, and have then tried to make it look like suicide. "Private Yablonsky struck himself ten times from behind with a steel pipe, broke both of his own legs, tied his own hands behind his back, and then hanged himself. A clear case of suicide. Alas, how did we fail to notice his suicidal tendencies?"

And Russian military commissars profess to wonder why some young men aren't eager to serve the Motherland.
 
Those following this thread have seen my explanation of some Russian prepositions. Let me now assure you that there ARE some Russian prepositions which are LONGER than one or two letters. Following are three which even have more than one syllable!


Между (pronounced MEZH-du) means "between."

Перед (sounding almost the like the English word "parrot") means "in front of," or sometimes "before" in the sense of "earlier in time than."

Внутри (pronounced v'noo-TREE) means "within; inside of."


The first two of these prepositions cause their associated nouns to be declined in the instrumental case; the third causes declension in the genitive case. As if it were reasonable or fair for me to expect you to remember that.
 
In the rules of Russian phonetics and spelling, certain consonants feel the same way I feel about "the notorious sixty-one": they hate it, and don't want it around. In all conventional written Russian, therefore, the vowel--

ы

--will never be found immediately after any of these consonants:

г ж к х ч ш щ

Early in my Russian studies, I made up a mnemonic phrase to help myself remember about the "anti-sixty-one" consonants. The following sentence is roughly based on the sounds of the consonants in question:

Gigi, she has Greek cheeks.

Memory-aid phrases, even rhymes, are very helpful in language learning.
 
While Russian shares many words with English and French, there are also some words which only misleadingly _seem_ identical with words of ours. These are known as "false cognates."

There are two Russian words that sound just like the English words "MOST" and "POST." They are also spelled with the exact Russian counterparts of the letters in the English words. But their _meanings_ are completely different. The Russian "MOST" is a noun meaning a bridge, as over troubled water. The Russian "POST" means a fast, as in not eating. Also, there is a Russian word which sounds just like our word "ROAST," though with no letter A in the Russian spelling; this word has nothing to do with cooking, but is the Russian noun for "growth."
 
Here's another small quirk.

You know how, in English, we will often say "they" in a totally undifferentiated and vague way, to identify a custom, or a common opinion, or action whose doers are numerous or anonymous? Like, "THEY say the Red Sox will do well next year," or "THEY'RE changing the timing on the traffic signals downtown."

Russian similarly uses an "invisible 'they.' " But THEIR "they" is SO invisible, that even the WORD "they" is deleted. A third-person plural noun, by itself with no subject, serves this purpose. For instance, third-person plural present for "talk/speak/say" is "GOVORYAT." The pronoun for "they" is "ONI." If a specific "they" are saying something at one particular time, it's "ONI GOVORYAT so-and-so;" but if we're doing that open-ended "They say," it's only "GOVORYAT so-and-so."
 
Now for an example of consonant crowding in Russian. Most languages _don't_ stick two percussive consonants (i.e. neither vocalized nor hissed) together at the start of a word, but Russian does. Their pronoun for asking "who" is:

KTO

The letters for this happen to be identical, visually _and_ phonetically, in both Russian and English. So to say this word, you have to lift your tongue near your palate for the K sound, then shift it forward for the T sound, before you make the O sound.
 
My mom (who is Russian) taught it to me before she taught me English. Before last year, though (when I went to live in Russia for a year) I knew it pretty fluently, but I had a HUGE ACCENT. Now, even though I do have a little bit of an accent remaining, it's not that prominent as it was before..
 
Nightfire, in answer to your question, you're right: the "sixty-one" vowel is replaced by the "backwards-N" vowel in those instances. In similar instances, the vowel pronounced "YAH" is replaced by the one pronounced "AH."

Dayhawk, who says you CAN'T learn Russian? If you were to read carefully through all the preparatory material I've provided on this thread, you should then be able to make progress with one of the home-study Russian courses which are available commercially.
 
Nightfire, in answer to your question, you're right: the "sixty-one" vowel is replaced by the "backwards-N" vowel in those instances. In similar instances, the vowel pronounced "YAH" is replaced by the one pronounced "AH."

i'm sorry i havent leafed through the whole thread..
do feminine words always end with vowels,
and masculine ones with a consanant?
 
No, there are a number of masculine nouns which end with a vowel. ALL neuter nouns end with a vowel, most often O. And if you count a consonant with "soft sign" as a consonant ending, some feminine nouns end with consonants.

Дочь --roughly rhyming with the English word "coach"--is the word for "daughter," obviously a feminine noun, and it ends with consonant and soft sign.
 
Well, that consonant-and-soft-sign ending--with certain consonants, anyway--is feminine territory. As for the masculine nouns that end in vowels, you simply have to learn which ones they are, just as a student of English simply has to learn which verbs are irregular in conjugation.
 
Okay. See, even after a year of living in Russia and learning in a Russian enviroment I never understood grammar. People constantly had to remind me how to pronounce things and what endings to use when.

That's another complicated thing - the endings of words.
 
Well, then, let's LOOK AT some word endings. I don't have time or energy to try to cover them exhaustively, but we'll find something representative.

Take the masculine noun лётчик , pronounced "LYOT-chik." Note that the vowel sound I represent with our letters Y and O is _one_ sound, not two: _not_ "eye-oh," but "yo." The word means an aviator. I have introduced it in its "nominative case," i.e. the form in which it appears when it is the subject of a sentence.

Now, if we want to refer to something or someone as relating or belonging to this pilot, that brings us to putting the word for him in the "genitive case." As in the Romance languages, to say something like "the pilot's sister," we would say what literally means "the sister of the pilot."

Сестра , pronounced "see-STRAH," is "sister" in the nominative. Лётчика is genitive of лётчик . Thus, "the aviator's sister" would be сестра лётчика.

Next, let's take that sister out of the subject position, and make her the object of direct action. A perfectly harmless direct action: I'll simply say that I see her. This calls for putting the sister in "accusative case"--which does not mean arresting her and charging her in court; it merely means that she is the grammatical recipient of direct action.

Я вижу , pronounced "Ya VEE-zhu," means "I see." Accusative case of "sister" is сестру , the only change in sound being that now the final vowel sound is "OOH." So, saying that I see the pilot's sister is:

Я вижу сестру лётчика.

Pardon me now, I'm just too tired to go on to prepositional, dative and instrumental cases. But I do have the energy to add that your experience proves what I've _long_ said: merely being surrounded each day by people who babble a language at you at warp speed is NOT enough to give you a true mastery of that language. Sooner or later, you need someone to help you with the _structure_ of that language. THAT is the function for which I created this thread.
 
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Thanks, Copperfox, that cleared things up for me somewhat :)

I had an extremely hard time with the endings. That was the hardest part of the language for me to finally tackle down, even though I still do make mistakes.
 
Don't feel bad. "Expert" linguists also make errors in grammar and syntax...especially if their language teaching was all immersion and no explanation.
 
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