Thread: Helping to learn English

Loan words... or a lack of them: isn't there some eastern European language (some Baltic language perhaps?) where the word for computer literally translates as "guesser"?

Originally Posted by Aaa

I never said English has more nuances than Russian, or any other language. We just have more WORDS, which allows for more WRITTEN nuances with respect to the meaning of an individual word.

Don't forget Russian can make words joining them together, adding suffixes and prefixes - and they rarely appear in dictionaries, unless they have a new distinct meaning. Meanwhile, all these suffixes etc. add nuances. Two prefixes (like in English 'reinforced') and three suffixes (not counting endings) are quite common in Russian.

Moreover, Russian dictionaries are very conservative and usually don't include informal words, regardless how often they are used.

English is also very efficient. Look at the "Rosetta Stone" of directions on any internationally marketed product. Count the words in English vs. any other language. We have less. Why?

You have more But they are shorter.

For example, in English you have to use many prepositions to replace declensions. Look at that example:

The girl wrote a letter to the boy with the pencil on the teacher's desk.
Девочка написала письмо мальчику карандашом на учительском столе.

Wanna count words? Then change "wrote" to "was writing", and this will make Russian sentence two letters shorter: писала instead of написала - and exactly twice as few words

Plus, we allow adjectives at will. A "baby-changing station" in English is "a station for changing diapers of babies" in many other languages. "Antilock brakes" become "brakes with a system to prevent locking".

It is so because these phrases are invented in English and then translated into other languages. If they were originated elsewhere, you'd have the same headache. And if the interpreter is clever enough he can usually find an appropriate native word or expression.

baby-changing station = комната матери и ребенка
Antilock brakes = антиблокировочные тормоза or better антиюзовая система

And yes, we don't have a word for toes, too. But what for? No Russian would think in terms of "toe-like structures" Likewise, we don't have appropriate words for 'civic' and 'civil' (the closest are "цивильный" and "гражданский", but they are not 100% the same). We even don't have a word for 'privacy' - there was no such conception in Russia for centuries.

But we do have separate words for "free" and "free of charge" (свободный и бесплатный). We have words уметь и мочь, which can both (esp. 1st) be only roughly approximated as 'can' (including be able to).

It's just the way of thinking...

mike wrote:

What are the articles used?

Pravit wrote:

someone mentioned dialects of russian that use articles. which?

The article in question is the definite article то and та. Yep, it may well have been derived from demonstrative pronouns. Here's how they are used:

Дай карандаш. - Give me a pencil.
but
Дай карандашто. - Give me the pencil.

Жил-был старик. Старикто был вечно пьян и женуто бил. Жената от него и сбежала.
(Once upon a time there lived an old man. The man was always three sheets and knocking his wife about. So the wife up sticks and left.)

It should be noted that it would be incorrect to drop то and та in those dialects, thus
"Жил-был старик. Старик был вечно пьян и бил жену" would sound to the speakers of those dialects as "Once upon a time there lived an old man. A man was always drunk and knocking a wife about" What man??? Whose wife???

AFAIK these dialects can be found around Smolensk and other parts of South Russia. I once spoke to a woman who was brought up to speak such a dialect. Later she went on to study in Moscow to become a linguist that's why she could explain to me this thing about articles in detail. Common people who speak this dialect don't even know the term 'article' I guess.

The rules of use of this article are basically the same as the rules of use of the definite article in English.

Aaa wrote:

The average English speaker uses more different words than the average Spanish speaker because MORE WORDS ARE AVAILABLE.

Nope, the average Spanish speaker uses as many words as the average English speaker does. The thing is that people with more or less similar lifestyles and educational backgrounds operate a comparable amount of words, I would even say that by and large they operate the same set of words and word combinations. English may have gazillions of words but the human brain makes do with something like 20,000. One could create endless streams of words in Russian using prefexes and suffixes and russifying loan words etc (which we do all the time), but what's the point? At the end of the day it's only those 20,000 something words that we all operate.

I would say the size of a vocabulary depends on the person's background and occupation.

Poet - 20,000
Doctor - 15,000
Character in a Quentin Tarantino movie - 40-50

keanu reeves - 5-15

Originally Posted by VendingMachine

Дай карандаш. - Give me a pencil.
but
Дай карандашто. - Give me the pencil.

AFAIK they should be written with hyphen:

дай карандаш-то!

Старик-то etc.

A little echo of them remains even in modern Russian. Apart from defining the subject, it can reflect a touch of impatience:

Дай карандаш-то! - give me the pencil at last!

Originally Posted by Zeus

Originally Posted by VendingMachine

Дай карандаш. - Give me a pencil.
but
Дай карандашто. - Give me the pencil.

AFAIK they should be written with hyphen:

дай карандаш-то!

Старик-то etc.

A little echo of them remains even in modern Russian. Apart from defining the subject, it can reflect a touch of impatience:

Дай карандаш-то! - give me the pencil at last!

The reason I didn't hyphenate them is that they are something completely different from the -то of the modern mainstream or standard dialect. (AFAIK -та isn't used at all in mainstream Russian.)
While дай карандаш-то means 'give me the/a(sic!) pencil at last' (we may not be interested in any particular pencil here) in most varities of Russian, the same sentence has a different meaning in the dialect I mentioned - there it means simply 'give me the pencil' and doesn't show impatience at all (unless you mark it with intonation). On the other hand 'дай карандаш' is either 'give me a pencil' or 'give me the pencil' in mainstream Russian, and only 'give me a pencil' in the dialect in question.

As you can see from the above their grammatical function is different.

Originally Posted by VendingMachine

As you can see from the above their grammatical function is different.

Of course it is different! But not always. I feel the ancestry is there. Even in modern Russian -то can act like definitive article:

Это уже не секрет. Журнал-то они видели.

Here -то implies some particular magazine. In English it would be "It's not a secret anymore. They've seen the magazine".
If you try to rearrange the sentence to make it formal, you'll have "Они видели тот (этот) журнал".

Even with pronouns: ты-то это знаешь! "Ты-то" - you in particular.

And anyway, if you try to write down the dialect in normal Russain (I suspect it doesn't have its own writing), I believe you have to use hyphen. It is incorrect in Russian to write non-existent words (like "старикто") without quotes. Meanwhile "старик-то" is correct even from the point of view of formal Russian.

P.S. Can you explain when "та" is used? You wrote "жената", but "женуто"...

Может "то" является сокращенной формой от "того", "тот" и т.д.

У старикато (у того о ком идет речь)
Карандашто (тот о котором говорим)
Жената (та самая о которой мы раньше сказали)
а
Женато (это может Жена того старика)

Жил-был старик. Старикто (тот о ком сказали) был вечно пьян и женуто (того старика) бил. Жената (та самая) от него и сбежала.

Это так, просто предположение.

Вообще круто. Столько нового можно здесь о своем языке узнать. Я обычно забываю про все эти "the" и "a". Теперь наверное будет легче зная про такую аналогию в нашем языке. А что, очень даже логичная грамматическая конструкция. Мне нраица

Ну тогда это вообще как в болгарском языке получается. У них тоже определённость выражается прибавлением -то к слову. А поскольку слова в болгарском не склоняются, то нельзя по нему судить, должны в русском языке эти -та, -то, -ту, склоняться или нет.

Originally Posted by Zeus

Originally Posted by VendingMachine

As you can see from the above their grammatical function is different.

Of course it is different! But not always. I feel the ancestry is there.

Of course it is. Of course this where it came from. But the point is that while in standard Russian -то can only sometimes be thought of as some sort of definite article, the dialect in question always treats -то as an article in much the same way as English uses the. But you're quite right in recognising its traces in mainstream Russian.

And anyway, if you try to write down the dialect in normal Russain (I suspect it doesn't have its own writing), I believe you have to use hyphen. It is incorrect in Russian to write non-existent words (like "старикто") without quotes.

It seems like you haven't read much dialect literature in Russian. The thing is that they do write non-existent words without quotes when spelling out dialect words - it's called 'eye dialect' by the way. You can see a lot of non-existent (from the point of view of proper spelling) words in dialect literature like ярославскыя робяты, сино, двуор, снех, рецка, etc. When spelling out dialect words and dialect pronunciations it is considered OK to omit quotes.

Meanwhile "старик-то" is correct even from the point of view of formal Russian.

It is indeed. However, the semantic value of 'старик-то' in formal Russian is, strictly speaking, not always identical to that of 'старикто' in the dialect.

P.S. Can you explain when "та" is used? You wrote "жената", but "женуто"...

As far as I can remember 'та' is used with singular feminine nouns in the nominative case, i.g. машината, руката, ряката, etc. In other cases they use 'то', i.e. машиныято, руцето, рякойто, etc.

Originally Posted by Dima

Может "то" является сокращенной формой от "того", "тот" и т.д.

У старикато (у того о ком идет речь)
Карандашто (тот о котором говорим)
Жената (та самая о которой мы раньше сказали)
а
Женато (это может Жена того старика)

Жил-был старик. Старикто (тот о ком сказали) был вечно пьян и женуто (того старика) бил. Жената (та самая) от него и сбежала.

Это так, просто предположение.

Вообще круто. Столько нового можно здесь о своем языке узнать. Я обычно забываю про все эти "the" и "a". Теперь наверное будет легче зная про такую аналогию в нашем языке. А что, очень даже логичная грамматическая конструкция. Мне нраица

Впринципе да, одного поля ягода. Только вот в то время как в литературной речи мы не говорим все время "та, того, той", мы можем лишь эпизодически их использовать для усиления, конкретизирования и т.д., в рассматриваемом диалекте они используются всегда когда требуется определенный артикль в ситуациях, очень похожих на ситуации употребления определенного артикля в германских языках. Опускание в таких ситуациях этих "то" и "та" в данном диалекте является ошибкой, и, кстати, сильно режет по ушам его носителей. (Как я уже показывал на примере истории про старика-пьяницу.

Да, все это очень интересно. Спасибо большое.

Dima: тебе может еще помочь тот факт, что the произошло от that - и грамматически они чаще всего взаимозаменяемы.

Spoke to a friend yesterday, he majors in lingustics at uni, and he said that in addition to -то, -та in South Russian dialects there was also another form of the definite article in some North Russian dialects, namely -от (possibly from вот): старикот, карандашот, etc. Almost like the Danish/Norwegian/Swedish -et