Category: Russian (Русский)

Книга

By Simon

Книга /’kniga/ is a Russian word for book, and also appears in other Slavic languages: кніга in Belarusian, книга in Bulgarian, Macedonian and Ukrainian, knjiga in Croatian and Slovenian, kniha in Czech, knéga in Kashubian, kъńiga (book, character, writing) in Old Church Slavonic, książka in Polish, and књига in Serbian.

It apparently comes from the Proto-Slavic *kъniga, from Old Turkic *küinig, from the Bulgaric Turkic *küiniv, from the Uyghur kuin, kuinbitig (book-spool/scroll), possibly from the Chinese 經 (jīng in Mandarin, *kˤeŋ in Old Chinese = classics, sacred book, scripture). It is possibly also related to:

Armenian: kniќ (slab, letter)
Assyrian: kuniku (slab, document)
Hungarian: könyv (book)
Korean: 권 (kwen – book)
Mordvin: końov (paper)
Sumerian: kunukku (seal, stamp)

If all these words are indeed related, it’s possible that they come from a common source – maybe Chinese, as paper was invented in China in about the 1st century AD, and books sometime after that. Are there any similar words in other languages?

Possession

By Simon

In the Celtic languages when you want to say that you have/own/possess something, you say that the thing is at/by/with you, often with the prepositions merging with the pronouns.

For example, this is how to say ‘I have a book’ in those languages:

– Irish: Tá leabhar agam [lit. “is book at-me]
– Scottish Gaelic: Tha leabhar agam [lit. “is book at-me]
– Manx: Ta lioar aym [lit. “is book at-me]
– Breton: Ur Ul levr a zo ganin [lit. “a book is with-me”]
– Cornish: Yma lyver dhymm [lit. “here is book to-me”]
– Welsh (North): Mae gen i lyfr (North Wales) [lit. “is with me book”]
– Welsh (South): Mae llyfr (gy)da fi [lit. “is book with me”]
– Welsh (literary): Mae gynnaf llyfr [lit. “is with-me book”]

This kind of structure occurs in a number of other languages that don’t have the equivalent of the verb ‘to have’. Russian, for example, uses a similar construction to show possession:

– У меня есть книга (U menja est’ kniga) = I have a book [lit. “by/at me there is book”].

Do you know of any other languages that use this type of stucture?

Rwsieg

By Simon

Yn ystod mis Tachwedd a mis Rhagfyr eleni dw i’n canolbwyntio ar Rwsieg. Dw i’n dysgu’r iaith efo languge101.com, cwrs arlein sy’n defnyddio ‘spaced repitition system’ neu system ailadroddiad ar wahan. Mae’r cwrs yn addysgu brawddegau Rwsieg efo recoriadau araf a recordiadau cyflymder normal. Yn gyntaf mae o’n gofyn yn Saesneg sut i ddweud rhywbeth yn Rwsieg, ac yna ti’n dweud y frawddeg, os ti’n ei gwybod hi. Yna ti’n gwrando yr ateb ac yn dweud wrth y system os ti’n gwybod y frawddeg yn berffaith, yn dda, yn eitha da, ayyb. Mae’r system yn dy brofi ar yr un frawddeg ar ôl rhyw munudau, ac yna ar ôl cyfnodau hirach a hirach i atgynerthu dy goffa.

Dyma tipyn bach o Rwsieg:

Здравствуйте = Helô / Shwmae (ffurfiol)
Привет = Helô / Shwmae (anffurfiol)
Как ваши дела? = Sut ydych chi?
Как дела? = Shwmae? Ti’n iawn?
Oткуда вы? = O ble ydych chi’n dod?
Oткуда ты? = O ble wyt ti’n dod? (inf)
Я из … = Dw i’n dod o …
Очень приятно = Mae’n dda gen i gwrdd â chi / Neis cwrdd â chi

Mae mwy o frawddegau a recordiadau (gan siaradwr Rwsieg brodorol) ar gael ar: Omniglot, ac mae ychydig o wersi Rwsieg yng Nghymraeg (trwy cartwnau) ar gael ar: Caterpillar and Red Post Boxes.

Dyma Geiriadur Rwsieg-Cymraeg-Saesneg-Llydaweg-Gwyddeleg dw i’n newydd darganfod.

Russian

By Simon

I’ve been concentrating on Russian for a week now and am making some progress. I listen to Russian language radio in the mornings while working on Omniglot, so my attention isn’t entirely focused on what they’re saying, but even so I am becoming more familiar with the sounds and rhythyms of the language. The names of people and places, the many recognisable international words, and the other words I recognise help me to get the gist of news reports.

I learn or revise phrases in language101.com every day, and can remember many of them. The phrases I learnt so far a mostly basic ones like ‘hello’, ‘how are you?’, ‘where are you from?’ and so on, with a few longer ones like ‘Russian is a beautiful language’.

Yesterday I started practising writing Russian letters in cursive style. I have tried this before, but have since forgotten how to write quite a few of them. The cursive versions of some of the letters look quite different to their printed forms (the same is true of Latin letters), for example a cursive upper case Д (D) looks like a Latin D, while the lower case д looks like a cursive Latin g.

There are tutorials on how to write cursive style Russian here and here.

With practice I’ll get used to the printed and handwritten versions of the Cyrillic alphabet, but I think it will take quite a while before I’m able to read it as easily as I can the Latin alphabet.

Верблюд стоит на трёх ногах

By Simon

Camels

A few years ago I tried to learn Russian just using Rosetta Stone Russian to test how well it worked. I chose Russian because I hadn’t studied before and because I thought it would be an interesting and useful language learn. At that time I also needed to put together web pages in Russian from time to time, so I thought being able to at least read the language a bit would be handy.

I spent over six months studying every day and in all that time I didn’t learn any phrases like Здравствуйте (Hello), Как дела? (How are you?) or Спасибо (thank you), but I did learn colours, numbers, a variety or nouns like мальчик (boy), девушка (girl), лошадь (horse), слон (elephant) and самолет (aeroplane), and ‘useful’ phrases like, Лошадь не настоящая (The horse is not real), Тигр сидит на стене (The tiger is sitting on the wall), and Верблюд стоит на трёх ногах (The camel is standing on three legs).

Rosetta Stone is designed to teach you entirely through the language you’re learning using photos and recordings. It’s not always clear exactly what the photos are supposed to represent, and when you’re asked to match photos to written or spoken words and phrases, it’s possible to do so without really understanding the words and phrases. The choice of phrases may seem somewhat strange, though many language courses, especially older ones, use similar kinds of phrases to teach you vocabulary and to illustrate various grammatical constructions.

Last week I started learning Russian again using Language101.com, which provides online courses in French, German, Danish, Spanish, Irish, Canadian French and Russian. It uses a spaced repetition system (SRS) with recordings, and contains thousands of phrases for each language. Over the past few days I’ve learnt more practical and useful Russian phrases than I did in six months with Rosetta Stone, and I’ll be writing a review of the site soon.

I plan to focus mainly on Russian for the next two months using such courses as Language101.com, WikiTranslate.org, A Spoonful of Russian and Language Bridge. I’ll also listen Russian language radio every day (at the moment I’m listening to Радио Голос России).

One word I recognised while listening to Russian radio yesterday was верблюд (camel) – I think they were talking about camels in Tajikistan. I remembered it because of the phrase from Rosetta Stone. This got me thinking that while you would rarely use phrases like верблюд стоит на трёх ногах, unless you happened to live in a camel-infested Russian-speaking region, such as Tajikistan, that phrase is very memorable because it’s unusual and funny.

Perhaps that’s the point – learning phrases like this helps you to remember ordinary words like stand, three and legs, as well as camel, and it shows you how to put them together. The more unusual and funny or silly the phrase, the more likely you are to remember it. It works for me at least. So I plan to try constructing similarly unusual, funny, silly and ridiculous sentences in Russian and other languages to help me remember vocabulary and grammatical patterns. I might even make some videos like the ones on my YouTube channel featuring these phrases.

Do you have any suggestions for suitably silly phrases?

[Addendum] Here’s my Language101.com review.

Lyrics Translate

By Simon

The other day I came across a useful site called Lyrics Translate, where you can find, submit and request translations of songs. It currently contains translations between a wide range of languages, including English, German, Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Polish and so on, and the site itself can be viewed in a variety of languages. There is also a forum for translators, as well as articles and videos.

So it look like a good place to practise languages you’re learning – you can find songs in those languages, either originals, or translated from other languages, and you could even have a go at translating songs yourself.

I have submitted translations of Cockles and Mussels (Molly Malone) in Irish and Manx – not my own translations admittedly, and just found a song in Breton with a translations in English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, and a video. There are quite a few other songs in Breton too.

Russian mountains

By Simon

Yesterday evening I discovered that the French term for roller coaster is les montagnes russes or Russian mountains. This got me wondering what roller coasters have to do with Russian mountains, and I’ve found that from the 17th Century the Russian were constructing “Russian Mountains” – series of hills and slides of ice reinforced with wooden supports designed for sleighs. They were especially popular during the 18th century in St. Petersburg, and the idea spread to other parts of Europe. A version using wheeled wooden carts on tracks was built in Paris in 1804 and named Les Montagnes Russes.

During the early 19th century a number of mining and railway companies in the USA started offering the public rides on steeply-inclined sections of track at quiet times. These were known as scenic gravity railroads. In 1884 LaMarcus Adna Thompson opened a Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway at Coney Island in 1884, and patented many aspects of the roller coaster, including a patent for a Gravity Switch-back Railway in 1885.

The origins of the name roller coaster are uncertain. One theory is that it comes from the rollers fitted to the slides or ramps on early American roller coasters along which sleds coasted. Another theory is that the name comes from a ride located in a roller skating rink in Haverhill, Massachusetts which consisted of a sled that moved along the rollers that made up the track. The inventors of this ride, Stephen E. Jackman and Byron B. Floyd, claim the first use of the term “roller coaster”.

Russian Mountain is term for roller coaster in Spanish (montaña rusa), Portuguese (montanha russa) and Catalan (muntanya russa), and Russians call them американские горки (amerikanskie gorki) or American Mountains.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_coaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Mountains

Peeling the library

By Simon

Today’s word, library, comes from the Old French librairie, a ‘collection of books’, which is a nominal use of adjective librarius, ‘concerning books’, from Latin librarium, ‘chest for books’, from liber (genetive of libri), ‘book, paper, parchment’, originally the ‘inner bark of trees’, probably a derivative of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) base *leub(h) – ‘to strip, to peel’.

In French the word librarie means bookshop. A French library is a bibliothèque, which comes via the Latin bibliothēca, from the Greek βιβλιοθήκη (bibliothêkê), ‘a place to store books’, which breaks down into βίβλος (biblos), ‘book’, and θήκη (thêkê), ‘chest’.

Variations on the theme of bibliothèque are used in a number of other languages, including:

Dutch – bibliotheek
German – Bibliothek
Greek βιβλιοθήκη (bibliothiki)
Italian/Portuguese/Spanish – biblioteca
Russian – библиотека (biblioteka)

In Welsh, a library is a llyfrgell, from llyfr, ‘book’ and cell, ‘cell’, while in Irish it’s leabharlann, from leabhar, ‘book’ and lann (not sure of it’s meaning*). In Chinese, a library is 圖書館 [图书馆] (túshūguăn) = ‘map book house’.

It seems that the word library, or something like it, is not used in it’s English senses in many languages. The only ones I can find are Sesotho and Tswana (laeborari), Tsonga (layiburari) and Venda (laiburari), which appear to be loanwords from English. The Basque word for library, liburutegia, might possibly have Latin or Greek roots.

[Addendum] *lann in Irish is an archaic/obsolete word that means floor, enclosure or church. It comes from the Old Irish lann (building, house, land, plot, plate), from the Proto-Celtic *landā ((open) space, land), from the Proto-Indo-European *lendʰ- (land, heath). It is cognate with the Welsh word llan (church, parish, monastery, yard, enclosure, village), the Spanish landa (plain), and the English words land and lawn [source].

Sources: Online Etymology Dictionary, Wiktionnaire, Yawiktionary

Is Russian losing ground?

By Simon

Since the break up of the Soveit Union, Russian has been losing ground in many of the former Soviet Republics, according to an article I found the other day. The “Year of the Russian Language”, which was officially opened in Paris in August, is an effort to address this trend by promoting the Russian language and culture outside Russia.

Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are the only former Soviet Republics where Russian is still has official status, alongside their own languages. Even in these countries Russian remains a contentious issue and there have been calls to make Belarusian to sole official language in Belarus. In Turkmenistan many Russian schools have been closed, and in Uzbekistan the number of Russian speakers has decreased significantly.

In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, English has replaced Russian as the most widely taught foreign language. The same is possibly true in other countries in Eastern Europe, though it has gained ground in Poland recently.

Learning Russian and Manx

By Simon

I’ve been learning Russian with Rosetta Stone for just over six months now and don’t feel like I’m making much progress. The Rosetta Stone Russian course is a fairly effective way of learning vocabulary and some sentence patterns, but not particularly useful if you want to learn how to converse in Russian. So I’m considering trying a different course. Any suggestions? As far as I can tell, the Teach Yourself Russian courses seem to be pretty good.

Why am I learning Russian? Well, a knowledge of that language would be quite useful to me when editing websites in Russian, and I am quite interested in Russian literature. I’ve read and enjoyed some Russian novels and short stories in English and French translation, and would quite like to be able to read them and others in the original – it will be quite a while before I can do that though, I think.

Ec y traa cheddin, ta mee gynsaghey Gaelg myrgeddin. Shegin dou jannoo ymmyd mennick jeh fockleyr, agh ta fys ennagh aym er y Ghaelg nish. Ta mee goaill gynsaghey çhengaghyn, ny çhengaghyn Celtiagh er lheh, as ta treisht orrym bee Gaelg flaaoil aym dy leah.

At the same time, I’ve also been learning Manx, and can now understand, speak, read and write it, at least to some extent, with frequent reference to a dictionary. The Manx courses I’ve been using are more focused on everyday language, and I’m more motivated to learn Manx.