Category: Russian (Русский)

Polyglottery

By Simon

Novi Sad Catholic Cathedral

Yesterday morning I met up with other conference participants and after a bit of a wander around the city, we had lunch then went to the opening ceremony a reception. In the after we had a little guided tour of Novi Sad seeing some interesting buildings, including the Catholic or Orthodox Cathedrals, and the fortress. There are some rather attractive buildings here, wide, pedestrianised café-lined streets, some nice parks and generally a relaxed kind of atmosphere.

In the evening we all went to a restaurant about 4 or 5km from the city centre for dinner. I walked there with a few others, and the rest went by bus or taxi. We had a nice dinner with lots of polyglot chat, then some people started dancing, and others carried on chatting.

Novi Sad town hall

Today there were lectures and talks on a variety of topics including sound symbolism, the magic of metaphors, language coaching, and acting and humour in a foreign language.

So far I’ve had conversations in about 10 languages and spoken bits and pieces of maybe 10 others. In some cases this was only a few words (all I know), in others it was a bit more. There are even two guys here who are learning Scottish Gaelic, one of whom also speaks a bit of Manx, and another who is learning Irish.

Novi Sad

By Simon

There are various polyglot activities scheduled for this afternoon and evening, and talks and lectures start tomorrow, so I have this morning free. I plan to do a bit of work on Omniglot, and will try to meet up with other people who are here for the conference.

Unlike in Berlin, where most people stayed in a large hostel and the polyglot gathering was in the same place, here in Novi Sad things are a bit more spread out – we are staying in various hotels around the city and the conference is taking place in a cultural centre. My hotel doesn’t have a restaurant and breakfast is available at a café round the corner.

It seems that smoking is permitted inside in some places here – ugh! Since the smoking ban came into force in the UK I’ve tried to avoid visiting places where indoor smoking is still allowed. I didn’t check before coming here and might not have come if I’d known. At least the weather is warm and sunny so I can sit outside and avoid most of the smoke.

I’ve spoken a bit of Serbian so far, and found that some people in hotels and restaurants speak English as well. Last night I shared a taxi from Belgrade to Novi Sad with one of the other conference participants – a Polish guy with Vietnamese roots. We talked mainly in French, with a bit of Spanish, English and Russian thrown in for good measure. The taxi driver spoke only Serbian, plus a bit of Russian and German, and I struggled to explain to him that one of the people who was supposed to be with us had missed his connection in Zurich, due to a delayed flight from London, and would be arriving later.

Patterns

By Simon

Recently I’ve been learning Serbian, Russian and Czech with free apps produced by Hallberg Ryman, who make them for quite a variety of languages for Andriod and iPhone/iPad. They are working well for me and I would definitely recommend them.

They use a flashcard/SRS-based system to teach you vocabulary arranged into categories such as numbers, colours, clothing, food, etc. Within each category you learn individual words, and then see them in various sentences, which you’re tested on by filling in blanks, or by assembling sentences from a bunch of random words.

One blank filling exercise involves typing the missing words – in the other you just select the words – and I find this the most difficult, especially for Russian. It is also the most useful because I have to think about spelling and the grammar.

The other day I was doing a lesson on colours in Czech and in the typing exercise was having trouble remembering the endings for each word. I tried to memorise them for each sentence, but found this tricky, then I thought that there must be a pattern to them. I soon realised that they were agreeing with the gender of the nouns they accompanied. Once I spotted the pattern, it was easy to remember and apply it. I’m sure this aspect of Czech grammar has come up before in my Czech studies, but I hadn’t internalised it. Now that I’ve worked it out for myself through observation and experiment, I won’t forget it.

When learning grammar, are you able to take it in and remember it just from grammatical descriptions, or do you need to see lots of examples?

Novi Sad

By Simon

Novi Sad / Нови Сад

As I’m going to the Polyglot Conference in Novi Sad (Нови Сад) [nôʋiː sâːd] in October, I thought I should find out what Novi Sad actually means – it’s the kind of thing I like to know. I guessed that Novi probably means new, but had no idea what Sad might mean.

According to this dictionary, нови means new and сад means ‘plantation’.

Wikipedia translates the name as ‘New Garden’, and gives versions of the name in a number of languages used in local administration:

– Serbian: Нови Сад, Novi Sad
– Hungarian: Újvidék (‘new territory/region/land’)
– Slovak: Nový Sad
– Rusyn: Нови Сад (Novi Sad)

In Latin it’s known as Neoplanta, and as Novi Sad in Croatian and Romanian.

The word сад / sad comes from the Proto-Slavic *saditi (to plant), and means vessel, container or dish in Macedonian; garden, orchard or park in Russian and Ukrainian; orchard in Czech and Polish; fruit in Lower Sorbian; and garden, orchard or plantation in Slovak.

Sources: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/сад and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sad

Berlin

By Simon

I’m having a wonderful time at the Polyglot Gathering. My luggage arrived, finally, and I’ve been speaking even more languages, including Cantonese, Taiwanese, Irish, Japanese, Czech, Russian and Turkish (a few words only). I haven’t found any speakers of Breton, Manx or Scottish Gaelic yet though.

I have been to some very interesting lectures and discussion about subjects like synesthesia, Scots, Indonesian, raising multilingual children, maintaining multiple languages, and the neuroscience of polyglot brains.

This morning I gave a talk about language death and revival, focusing particularly on the Celtic languages. When I saw that I’d been given an hour in the programme I thought I wouldn’t have enough material to fill it, but I could have easily talked for twice as long. Instead I talked for about 45 minutes then opened it up for questions. My talk was semi-structured and semi-stream of conciousness, but it seemed to go down well, and people found it interesting.

Tonight there’s another polyglot games evening, similar to the one we had last night. Tomorrow night I’ll be singing a few songs in the international culture evening. I will probably do a Welsh one and maybe an Irish one, but haven’t decided which ones yet.

Voices and calls

By Simon

After writing yesterday’s post I was thinking about the Czech word hlas [ɦɫas] (voice, vote) and realised that it is quite similar to the Welsh word for voice, llais [ɬais]. I wondered it they share the same root.

Hlas comes from the Proto-Slavic *golsъ (voice), from the Proto-Balto-Slavic *galsas (voice), from the Proto-Indo-European *golHsos, from *gels- (to call)

The words for voice in other Slavic languages come from the same root: Old East Slavic: голосъ (golosŭ); Belarusian: голас (hólas); Russian: голос (gólos) and глас (glas – archaic/poetic); Ukrainian: голос (hólos); Old Church Slavonic: гласъ (glasŭ); Bulgarian: глас (glas); Macedonian: глас (glas); Serbo-Croatian: гла̑с; Slovene: glas; Kashubian: głos; Polish: głos; Slovak: hlas; Lower Sorbian: głos; Upper Sorban: hłós.

Also from the same root are the Latin gallas (cockrel); Romani glaso (voice); Romanian glas (voice, vote); Old Norse kalla (to call); English call, Dutch kallen (to chat, talk); German kallen (to scream, talk loudly, talk too much); Lithuanian galsas (sound, echo); Welsh galw (to call) and llais (voice); and possibly the Irish and Scottish Gaelic glaodh (to cry, shout).

Sources: Wiktionary

Babbling

By Simon

I spent last weekend at my mum’s house, along with my brother, sister-in-law and their one-year old daughter. The last time I saw my niece was at Christmas, when she was making some sounds, but not really babbling much. Now she is babbling away all the time and sometimes says recognisable words, or at least utters sequences of sounds that might be words. Her mother, who comes from Russia, speaks mainly in Russian with her, while her father speaks only English with her (he doesn’t speak Russian). I haven’t heard any Russian words among her babbles, but there might be some I don’t recognise – my knowledge of Russian is somewhat limited. They also use some signs with her which they have learnt at baby signing classes, most of which look like standard BSL signs to me.

It’s fascinating to observe her linguistic abilities developing, and it won’t be long before she is using more words and starting put them together.

Russian melancholy?

By Simon

The other day I was trying to learn some adjectives in Russian, and noticed that there seemed to be more Russian words for sad (9) than for happy (4), at least in one dictionary I checked (bab.la). This might be a coincidence as in other dictionaries are more words for happy than for sad. In fact, combining the words together gives us nine words for happy and ten for sad.

Words for happy include:

– счастливый = happy (also: fortunate, lucky, providential, blessed)
– весёлый = happy (also: gay, cheery, fun, hilarious)
– довольный = happy (also: glad, pleased, amused, content)
– удачный = happy (also: successful, felicitous, chancy, fortunate)
– благополучный = happy (also: safe, trouble-free)
– ликующий = happy (also: jubilant, exultant, gleeful, elate, cookahoop, triumphant)
– радостный = happy (also: jolly, joyful, joyous glad, merry, cheery, high, gleeful, frabjous)
– удачливый = happy (also: lucky, successful, prosperous, fluky)
– улыбчивый = happy (also: smiling)

Words for sad include:

– прискорбный = sad (also: sorry, lamentable, regrettable, grievous)
– грустный = sad (also: melancholy, wailful, lamentable, minor)
– печальный = sad (also: down, sorrowful, deplorable, dolorous)
– тёмный = sad (also: dark, dirty, cimmerian, darksome)
– унылый = sad (also: moody, dreary, chap-fallen, cheerless)
– ужасный = sad (also: awful, horrible, terrible, dire)
– отчаянный = sad (also: desperate, foolhardy, hotshot, reckless)
– тусклый = sad (also: dim, gloomy, blear, bleary)
– тяжелый = sad (also: heavy, difficult, hard, grinding)
– досадный = sad (also: annoying, provoking, pesky, plaguesome, vexatious)

I wondered if this might reflect the reputed Russian melancholy nature of the Russian character. Do you think there’s anything in this?

Are all of these words in common use, or are some used more than others?

Even if this has no particular significance, it does illustrate the difficulty of choosing the right word when translating from one language to another.

Sources: http://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-russian/, Reverso, EUdict

Suns, moons and sputniks

By Simon

The Sun / Солнце

Earlier today I was thinking about how I might learn more Russian, and realised that I need to get to grips with the grammar – the verb conjugations, noun declensions and so on. Trying to memorise verb tables and noun declensions and other grammatical gubbins doesn’t appeal to me, so I thought about other ways I might approach this. I thought that one reason why I haven’t learnt these things very well so far, even though I’m halfway through the Russian course, is because I haven’t made a conscious effort to do so, and haven’t practised using them nearly enough. I think I need lots more examples of how they’re used then my course supplies, and need lots of practise using them.

I thought that one possible approach would be to choose a word or topic, then try and make sense of the Wikipedia page about it, with help from Google translate, which not only translates the text into English, but also has transliteration and text-to-speech functions, so I can listen and read the text. So today’s word is the sun, which in Russian is Солнце [‘solntse]. I can only understand some of the words on the Russian page about the sun on Wikipedia, but one that stood out for me was спутники [‘sputniki], which means satellites or moons and is familiar because it’s similar to the name of the the first artificial satellite, Спутник-1 (Sputnik-1), which was launched in 1957. I knew this name, but didn’t know what it meant, until now.

The word sputnik also means ‘fellow traveller’ or ‘travelling companion’ and was short for спутник Земли (sputnik zemlyi – ‘traveling companion of the Earth’). It comes from the Russian с (with, together) and пут (path, way), from the Old Church Slavonic poti, from the Proto-Indo-European root *pent- (to tread/go; path, road), according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. *pent- is also the root of the English word find and the Latin pōns/pontis (bridge).

I had no idea I’d find all that out when I started writing this post. I haven’t learned much Russian, but I have learned other things.

Language learning plans

By Simon

At the beginning of 2013 I mentioned on this blog that I planned to continue studying Breton and Russian, and maybe have a go at Swedish or Norwegian. I hoped, though didn’t mention, that I would be able to converse reasonably well in Breton and Russian by now, but haven’t achieved that. I continued my studies of both languages throughout most of the year, with some breaks, especially towards the end of the year, but rarely had opportunities to speak either language with others, so my conversational abilities didn’t develop as much as my listening and reading skills.

This year I plan to concentrate on Dutch and Russian, while maintaining and improving my other languages. I know people who speak or who are learning Dutch, so have regular opportunities to speak the language. I hope to find some Russian speakers to speak Russian with as well.

What are you language learning plans for this year?