The Economist on the Joys of Russian
Apr. 7th, 2008 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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shaulreznik
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. [...]
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.”
http://www.economist.com/daily/diary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10943973
shaulreznikTHE 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. [...]
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.”
http://www.economist.com/daily/diary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10943973
