Thread: Long Words

Length is in the eye of the beholder. Помогите! seems long to you, not to a Russian.

I thank all of you who responded.

My question was not whether Russian words are long, nor did I intend to belittle the Russian language or its speakers. I wanted to know whether Russians are sometimes impeded by frequent, everyday words that have many syllables.

Some very common words can be shortened Здравствуйте-здрасте, человек-чек, сейчас- щас (the last one - nearly always). The rest are pronounced normally
Stop! = Остановитесь! You can say Стойте!

...in critical situations Russian commanders resort to offensive language (Russian mat) which shortens an average word length to... 3.2 letters. The reason is that some word combinations and even sentences can be replaced with one word...

Doesn’t the use of abbreviations or shorter substitutions in fact indicate that the original versions of words are found to be unwieldy?

May I answer you in Russian?

Yes. I wish that posters here would respond in both Russian and English (or their own languages). Then readers might be able to get a better idea of what the posters are endeavoring to express.

Да! Я желаю, чтобы писатели здесь отвечали и по-русски и по-английски (или на своих языках). Таким образом читатели возможно могут приобретать лучшую идею того, что писатели стараются выражать.

(Вы вольны исправлять мои ошибки.)

Originally Posted by mudrets

My question was not whether Russian words are long, nor did I intend to belittle the Russian language or its speakers. I wanted to know whether Russians are sometimes impeded by frequent, everyday words that have many syllables.

It's worth remembering that unstressed syllables in Russian are invariably significantly reduced. ( i think I read somewhere that the typical length of an unstressed syllable is 1/3.5 of a stressed syllable, as opposed to a maximum average ratio of 1:2.5 in English) This is why unstressed я,и,е and а,о,ы all sound the same respectively. So most syllables in long words are skimmed, or in some cases virtually swallowed completely.

Take for example the name of the footballer Билялетдинов.

Russian commentators pronouce this like:
билили - ДИнов -> бьльль -ДИнов -> бьль -ДИнов
with the t almost always being omitted/swallowed.

Their English counterparts or the other hand conscientiously enunciate and differentiate every last letter - бил-я-'лет-ди-нов.

So although most words aren't technically shortened, it seems like native speakers can still get them out pretty quickly.

Итак, кроме того, чтобы подсчитывать буквы, по-моему интересно было бы еще вынуть секундомеры или, может, вымеривать как много двигается язык и т.п.