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Apr. 24, 2005 I've been studying Russian intermittently for over 20 years, and have read many famous Russian writers--Tolstoy, Dostoievski, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and others. However, except for a couple of months in the former Central Asian provinces of the USSR and membership in a Russian glee club in New York, I haven't had many opportunities to speak. Anyway, I'm well acquainted with the grammar of the language. I thought of calling this article "The Virtues and Vices of the Russian Language", like similar articles that I wrote on the Chinese and Spanish languages. Unfortunately, the Russian language has few, if any, virtues, at least from the learner's standpoint. It is an extraordinarily difficult language. I've heard people groan about the difficulties of German, Latin and Greek, but Russian is far harder than any of those three. The first difficulty is pronunciation. Unlike those three languages, Russian stress can be on any syllable in a word, but there is no accent mark in Russian, and one can hardly expect to guess right consistently. It's important to know where the accent falls, because vowels in unaccented syllables may change their pronunciation according to a series of rules. Thus, "moloko" (milk) is pronounced "m?lakó", where I'm using a question mark to denote an obscure vowel like "a" in "sofa", while "zoloto" (gold) is pronounced "zól?t?". Sometimes even forms of the same word shift their accent, as "golová" (head, Nominative), pronounced "g?l? vá", "golovu" (head, Accusative), pronounced "gól? vu", and "golov" (heads, Genitive), pronounced "galóf". These shifts are ubiquitous and always unpredictable. If Russian had an accent mark, like Spanish or Greek, its orthography would be virtually perfect, but as it stands, it's a nightmare. Spelling reforms were promulgated by both Peter the Great and Lenin, but both rejected the idea of adopting accent marks, for some strange reason. Russian exhibits many combinations of consonants that do not appear in Western languages, and most people might find them difficult, as in these cases: fsyo--everything, vnuk--grandson; lgun-- liar; mgnovennii--momentarily; tkat--weave; rtut-- mercury; vzvodit--raise; vzglyad--view, fstryechu- -meeting; stklyanka--vial. Words tend to be long: mushchina--man; zhenshchina--woman; kotoraya (who, Feminine); lzhecvidetelstvovat-- perjure; razgovarivayuschiye-conversing. Russian has three genders Masculine, Feminine and Neuter, but names of objects are not necessarily neuter. "Stol" and "stul" (table and chair) are masculine; "kniga" and "bumaga" (book and paper) are feminine. People who have studied German, Latin or Greek know what a declension is, but it hardly figures in English, Spanish, French or Italian, except with pronouns. Thus we may say that "he", "him" and "his" are the Nominative (or Subjective) Case, the Accusative (or Objective) Case, and the Genitive (or Possessive) Case of the pronoun "he". Russian has six such cases-- Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Instrumental, and Prepositional. Almost all nouns, as well as pronouns, exhibit 6 cases and 2 numbers (Singular and Plural), so basically the declension of a noun is a twelvefold paradigm. Usually, there are only 9 or 10 different words, because some of them do double duty. Thus, before one begins to talk about houses he should know the declension of "dom" (house): dóm, dóm, dóma, dómy, dómom, dóme, domá, domá, domóv, domám, domámi, domákh. This paradigm does not apply throughout the language. Other nouns follow other paradigms, so that almost every declension has to be learned by rote. Verbs are even worse. Though Russian has fewer verb forms than the Romance languages, they are more complicated. One difficulty is the formation of the Perfective from the Imperfective. An example would be "ya pisal" (I was writing) and "ya napisal" (I wrote). Here the prefix "na" has been added. For another verb, it may be a different prefix, as "ya chital" (I was reading) and "ya prochital" (I read), or "ya bolel" (I was getting sick) and "ya zabolel" (I got sick). Often a suffix is added or subtracted instead, as "ya zagovarival" (I was beginning to talk) and "ya zagovoril" (I began to talk). Sometimes vowels drop out in various forms, "ya shol" (I was going, Masculine) and "ya shla" (I was going, Feminine). The accent sometimes shifts, "pishú" (I write), "píshesh" (you write). Mind you, the accent marks aren't there; I added them. There's no such thing as a regular verb in Russian. One must learn 4 principal parts of each and every verb in the language. Russian adjectives agree in gender, number and case with the nouns that govern them, so theoretically an adjectival declension would have 24 forms, all genders being the same in the plural, but generally there are only 10 or 12 different forms, each doing double or triple duty. Actually it would probably be easier if there were 24 distinct forms, as one is often in doubt whether, say, the accusative or genitive is meant. Russian has no articles. Thus "stol" means "a table" or "the table". This is a feature Russian shares with Latin, Turkish, Chinese and Japanese. Russian usually omits the copula: on zdyes--he (is) here; oni Russkii--they (are) Russian. This is like Hebrew and Arabic. Russians, even Tolstoy, use double negatives all the time: on nye znayet nichevo--he don't know nothing; nikto skazal nichevo--nobody said nothing. Compare Spanish and French. An unfortunate circumstance attendant on the Russian language or any other language that has conjugations and/or declensions, which includes all Indo-European and Semitic languages, is that only the head word of a conjugation or declension appears in dictionaries. For example, a foreigner learning English cannot usually find "drank", "slept" or "went" in a dictionary. He has to find out that they are derivatives of "drink", "sleep" and "go". In other words, he has to thumb through a dictionary or ask somebody. However, in English, a good dictionary will give the past tense and participle of an irregular verb, so that if the learner finally guesses the head word, he can verify it. The dictionary will say "drink (past tense--drank)". In Russian, however, not only are there far more numerous and complicated irregularities than in English, but there is no comprehensive dictionary on the market, as far as I know, that gives all the derivative forms, so even if you have managed to guess right, you won't be able to confirm it. Romanov's Dictionary is quite good in this respect. Every noun, verb or adjective carries a number that refers to a paradigm in the appendix that contains all the requisite information, but Romanov´s is a very small dictionary, and much vocabulary simply isn't there. Oxford Russian Dictionary has a much larger vocabulary, but it doesn't contain any reference to a system of paradigms. The appendix has a list of principal parts of select verbs; in other words, the verb you're trying to find, though irregular, has perhaps a 10% or 20% chance of being listed. I've gone through numerous Russian-English and Russian-Russian dictionaries, but I´ve never found one that is totally adequate. Even though Oxford Russian Dictionary has the most comprehensive vocabulary among dictionaries commonly available, there are many words missing from it too. It is perfectly adequate for 19th century writers, like Tolstoy, Dostoievski and Gogol, but is woefully inadequate for 20th century writers, like Sholokhov, Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak. I've encountered literally thousands of words in their writings, not all of them regionalisms, slang or dialect, that are not in Oxford. So you can never attain 100% comprehension. Though there is plenty of material in and about Russian on the Worldwide Web, so far I haven't downloaded any of the available programs for typing Cyrillic (Russian) letters. Perhaps someday I will. My Russian reading speed is only about half my English reading speed, so in the crunch for time, I usually read an article in English if I have a choice. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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