AndyRussian invasion of Ukraine
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It’s been a quiet week this week – I wonder if everyone was out getting drunk on Russia Day? Anyway, on with the best of this week’s posts:
- Katie introduces us to Polittechno. “The name, ‘Polittechno’, comes from a compound of the words ‘political’ and ‘techno’ and consists of putting politicians’ words to techno beats.”
- Kyle and Svet head out to their village hideaway for a nice quiet weekend – then get caught up in a tornado.
- Josefina celebrates Russia day in typical linguist style – she tackles the most difficult part of Russian grammar – Aspects. “Well, it is time for a confession: the aspect system of Russian verbs is so complex that a foreigner cannot comprehend it fully and wholly EVER. Now dont let that get you down because you can learn the basics of it almost painlessly.”
- Anatoly Karlin summarises his views on Russian demography.
- Russia Blog provides a summary and assessment of the recent World Russia Forum.
- The Russian President joins the Special Forces for a day, and looks a bit geeky playing around with big guns.
- If you’re looking for a weekly roundup of news, rather than blog posts, I recommend taking a look at Patrick Armstrong’s Russian Federation Weekly Sitrep, over at Russia, Other Points of View.
Phew.
Finally, courtesy of the Russian President, Gorbachev sings:
The system of Russian verbs isn’t that complicated. Next to Classical Greek, with its 6+ infinitives for every verb, it’s positively prosaic.
Like French, Russian is one of those languages people like to pretend is really, really hard, but actually isn’t.
I don’t know about classical Greek, but I’m learning modern Greek at the moment, and finding it much tougher than Russian…
I took a brief look at a modern Greek textbook recently. I know they’ve lost a couple of cases, Do they still have the aorist verb system (with its separate infinitives) and the funky middle voice (with its separate infinitives)?
Beats me – I’m still very much at the beginner stage. Ask me again in a couple of months 🙂
Speaking of Greece (a fellow Orthodox country! 🙂 ). You know how Russia is often criticized for interpreting its past in a “wrong” way that alienates its neighbors?
Have you caught the OUTRAGE!! in Greece over Macedonia renaming its main highway the Alexander the Great Highway?
Talk about living in the past.
Kyle and Svet(a) got themselves a nice ecological refuge (tornados or not), while looking at the pictures I could almost feel the fresh air. I’m wondering if there are any vacant houses there for sale?
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Chris sez:
“Like French, Russian is one of those languages people like to pretend is really, really hard, but actually isnt.”
Not generally true, for English speakers at least. The Defense Language Institute (which trains US Army linguists) puts languages in four categories, based on how long it takes English speakers to learn them. French is in Category 1 (easiest), along with other Romance languages. Russian, as well as other Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages, is in Category 3. The hardest category (4) is reserved for languages like Japanese and Chinese.
Yeah, that’s the DLI. I mean in the popular consciousness. French is supposed to be hard because it’s all intellectual and stuff.
Of the languages I’ve studied (not that I can speak all of them), I would put French as easiest, then German, then Russian, then Latin, and then Greek.
Of the languages I’ve studied (not that I can speak all of them), I would rank them in this order:
Spanish, French – easiest
German – harder
Russian – harder still
Czech, Polish – even harder than Russian, though not by much
Lithuanian – even harder than the Slavic languages
Japanese – hardest
This list leaves out Yiddish, which is hard for me to rank because so much of it comes from German, which I already knew; and Latin, which I only studied in desultory manner. I also had a few Finnish lessons; it was obvious from the beginning that was a hard one.
It’s interesting how these languages interact. I studied a little bit of Icelandic, and with both German and English — ha! once you get the “the article goes on the end of the word” thing, it’s easy. The Scandinavian languages’ general closeness to English is a big bonus.
Unfortunately, Russian has occupied that part of my brain that controls foreign languages and it takes me great effort to actually speak anything else. I’ve started putting the direct object into the genitive if it’s an animate object in Greek…
Classical Greek, Latin, Russian, Icelandic … Chris darling, it’s so tacky to go around to blogs to flaunt your big brain like this. And I have absolutely never heard anyone suggest that French is really, really hard. Not even you, when you incorrectly use “vous.”
Anyway, keep up the good work, Andy! 🙂
Oops!
If “big,” it’s a malformed one at that.
I’d rank them thus. Of course Russian and English are very much guesstimated because I learned them through immersion rather than books.
French
English / German
Russian
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I learned both English and German in native environments. In my opinion German (because of its grammar) is much harder than English
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“Classical Greek, Latin, Russian, Icelandic Chris darling, its so tacky to go around to blogs to flaunt your big brain like this.”
I studied a little Hebrew too! 🙂
English is my native language so it is hard to judge, but I think that the weird English tenses (which Icelandic and I suppose the other Scandinavian languages also have, which is weird since they are North Germanic languages while English and German are both West Germanic — what happened to German?) would make it difficult. Really the declension pattern in German is ridiculously simple.
Have you caught the OUTRAGE!! in Greece over Macedonia renaming its main highway the Alexander the Great Highway?
This is why Macedonia doesn’t have an embassy in Canberra: the Greek dispora has prevented it.
Incidentally, Russian verbs are okay until you get to the perfective and imperfective: when you use which is completely beyond me and, I suspect, anyone.
I have problems wrapping my mind around a society in which the doings of Alexander the Great (and the dirty Macedonian-loving traitor Aristotle) can arouse such passion.
“Incidentally, Russian verbs are okay until you get to the perfective and imperfective: when you use which is completely beyond me and, I suspect, anyone.”
I find it’s more than just aspect that’s the problem. I once sat down and tried to figure out exactly how many ways there are to conjugate a Russian verb. I came up with upwards of 10 different conjugations, and that’s just my informal count.
“I came up with upwards of 10 different conjugations, and thats just my informal count.”
Har! Look at a complete Classical Greek conjugation,list sometime, just for a boring verb like “luein.” (Seemingly the only completely regular verb in Athenian dialect.) Russian has usually two infinitives for every verb. Greek has at least 6 (luein, lusai, luesthai, lusasthai, lelukenai, luthenai, and I’m sure I’m forgetting the passive plusperfect infinite at least).
luo, lueis, luei, luomen, luete, luousin
luomai, lue, luetai, luometha, luesthe, luontai
eluon, elues, elue, eluomen, ulete, eluon
elusa, elusas, eluse, elusamen, elusate, elusan
luoimi, luois, luoi, luiomen, luoite, luoien
Etc. etc, etc, etc.
Russian barely even has a subjunctive. I mean, c’mon.
I think we’re talking about 2 different things. You’re talking about the number of forms one verb can take (right?). I’m talking about the diffferent classes of verb, where each one requires a different set of conjugations. Consider:
????????, ????????, ????????, ???????????, ?????, ?????, ?????, ????, ?????????, ??????, ???????, and so on…all conjugated differently
Yeah, that is what I meant (different tenses/moods of a single verb).
Greek was (still is? I don’t know modern Greek) characterized by a huge number of different set of conjugation patterns. I’m going to write in Latin characters rather than Greek because I do not have a Greek keyboard or translit program. There are the -ein verbs (like “luein” above, “to loosen/free”), which become “esthai” in the middle voice, e.g. luesthai, “to be loosened or freed.” Then there are the -emi verbs, like hiemi (I send), didomi (I give), istami (I stand), etc. And then a whole bunch of others. When I get home I might actually try to tally up all the declension patterns — however boring this might be to ecerybody else. 🙂 I wonder how they would compare to Russian.
Among other things, a much better source on languages:
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