Perform oral sex more often
April 4th, 2008The final entry in the diary on language
The baffling, beautiful richness of Russian
THE language I am fondest of is Russian. It is a bruised sort of affection, like the residue of many years with an intense but difficult lover. No other language has caused me such pain, or given me such pleasure in the discovery of its quirks and beauty.
It starts with the pronunciation. Aside from consonants that don’t exist in English and the “soft sign” (represented in this entry by an apostrophe), which softens the consonant before it, the vowels in Russian are big beefy things, requiring facial muscles that never get a workout in English.
For my first few months in Moscow I felt as if I was chewing pebbles. When I moaned about it to a Russian friend, he explained that “English is produced in the back of the mouth, but in Russian” — he puffed out his lips — “we speak from here, from the front. In order to strengthen these muscles,” he concluded seriously, “you should perform oral sex more often.”
Then there’s the grammar. Like Arabic and Hebrew, Russian is based around verb roots that are used to form other parts of speech. But unlike Arabic and Hebrew, it is agglutinative, so that each basic verb can swell with an array of prefixes and suffixes.
These are what make life hell. In verbs that denote movement, the prefixes work like prepositions in English — you “go up”, “go down” and so on. However, in English, since the prepositions are separate words, you can always just “go” if you want to keep it simple.
Not in Russian. If a prefix is required it’s required, and you need to think about whether you are going in, out, up, down, towards, away from, around, or on the way to somewhere else. In addition, the core verb, the “go” itself, varies depending on whether you are going by foot, land vehicle, air or sea; and then on whether you are going once, several times or there and back, have finished going, or are still engaged in it.
When it comes to other sorts of verbs, the prefixes modify the meaning entirely, turning entire swathes of words into siblings. To command, punish, prove, order, point out, relate and predict are all variants of the word for “say”.
It’s enough to make you tear your hair out. Who can remember which is which between prikazat’ (to command), nakazat’ (to punish), dokazat’ (to prove) and so on? One of my teachers said something that was useless to a floundering beginner, but later proved very wise: try to “visualise” the language.
Because they are originally prepositions, each of the prefixes implies a position or motion, or both. Pri is “close to” or “towards”, so to command is to use your word to bring someone towards your wishes. Na is “on” or “on to”; to punish someone is to lay your word on them.
This makes Russians aware of a connectedness between concepts that never occurs to many Westerners. It also makes for a lexical richness that simply doesn’t exist in English. Russian has a word for “sleeping too much”, perespat’, which doesn’t mean oversleeping and missing your appointment — there’s a word for that too, prospat’ – but actually sleeping more than you should have and feeling groggy in the morning. Beware, though: to perespat’ with someone means to have a one-night stand, which is when neither of you sleeps enough.
Some words are also beautifully evocative. There is a verb for the English phrase “to get lost in thought”, which is made from the verb for “to think”, the prefix za meaning behind or beyond, and the reflexive suffix. You could translate it as “to think oneself into the beyond”.
Russians are inordinately proud of their tongue’s complexity. Friends have told me in all earnestness that they think Shakespeare might be better in Russian. In Moscow, a taxi driver attempted to prove the point by asking me to consider the words written next to the date on a carton of milk.
In Russian this is an orotund, literary phrase — a direct translation, in fact, of the French à consommer de préférence avant. “Zhelatel’no upotrebit’ do“, repeated the driver, rolling his tongue around the words and lifting a hand from the steering wheel to trace their curvaceous cadences. “It is beautiful, cultured. And in your language?” He puckered his mouth sourly. “Best bee-for!”
Finally, Russian is also rich in slang — so rich that it has not one slang, but two. The first, fenya, is a criminal patois similar in style to Cockney rhyming slang, Argentinian lunfardo and the mid-20th-century British gay argot, polari. It uses substitutions, as well as loan-words from other languages, to confuse the unwary: silver is “laundry”, having sex is “frying”, stealing is “buying”, and so on.
Interestingly, fenya contains a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew words: Jews entered the criminal world during tsarist times, when they were barred from owning land and from many professions. A common phrase even today in Russian is na khalyavu, “for free”, from the Hebrew khalav, “milk”, because “milk money” was the name of donations for the Jewish community in Palestine.
The second kind of slang, mat, is like a much more sophisticated version of the Chilean huevón words (see Tuesday) — an entire language derived chiefly from a handful of sexual swear-words. One of my prize possessions is a 560-page dictionary of mat that I found at Grant and Cutler, a specialist languages bookshop in London.
The dictionary, published in Moscow in 1997 by one Professor Tatiana Akhmetova, seems to be an academic lexicon rather than a survey of current usage. Most of my Russian-speaking friends have never heard of much of it. But one particular phrase is so original and colourful that I have been running a small private campaign to bring it back into everyday use. To describe something that has shown up unexpectedly, out of nowhere, you say that it appeared kak iz pizdy na lyzhakh, which translates as “like out of a cunt on skis.”