Introductory remarks

Every language has conventional formulae to which its speakers resort in certain situations that constantly occur in everyday life: addressing others, attracting their attention, making acquaintance, greeting and parting, conveying congratulations, wishes, gratitude and apologies, making requests and invitations, giving advice, offering condolences and paying compliments. Telephone conversations take place and letters are written within established frameworks that vary according to the relationship between those communicating and the nature of the exchange.

Ignorance of the formulae in use for these purposes among speakers of a language may make dealings with them on any level difficult and unsuccessful or may even cause offence. Or to look at it from a more positive point of view, the speaker who has mastered a limited number of these formulae will make her or his intentions and attitudes clear, set a tone appropriate to the situation and thereby greatly facilitate communication and win social or professional acceptance.

One may say that there are particular advantages for the foreign student of Russian in deploying the correct formulae in a given situation. In the first place, Russians are aware of the difficulty of their language for the foreign student and have little expectation that a foreigner will speak it well, let alone that a foreigner should be sympathetic to their customs, of which they are inured to criticism.

This new edition of Using Russian: a Guide to Contemporary Usage represents an extensively revised and augmented version of the first edition, which was published in 1996. Whereas the first edition consisted of ten chapters the current edition has twelve and is some ninety pages longer than the first. Our thanks are due to Cambridge University Press for allowing this enlargement.

Some material in the first edition that is now out-of-date or that is for some other reason of less interest than it was in 1996 (for example, neologisms associated with the period of glásnost′ and perestróika) has been excised or reduced. On the other hand, much fresh material has been incorporated, especially in the first five chapters and the last chapter. The main changes that have been made are as follows.

Chapter 1 is based on sections 1–5 inclusive of the first chapter of the first edition but the material has been substantially rewritten and considerably expanded. Section 1.1, on the distribution of the Russian language, has been revised in the light of information in the most recent Russian census (2002). Section 1.2, on varieties of language, has been slightly expanded to include material on the distinction drawn, for example by David Crystal, between written and spoken language. Section 1.3, on registers in contemporary Russian, contains some fresh examples of usage and a new section (1.3.6) on the language of the internet (a subject to which this new edition as a whole pays much attention).

The Russian language and its distribution

The Russian language belongs to the East Slav group of languages, itself part of the Slavonic branch of the Indo-European family. The relationship of Russian to the other modern European languages is illustrated by Figure 1 (which includes only languages still used by substantial numbers of speakers).

It is difficult to give accurate up-to-date figures for the number of people for whom Russian is their native or first language, or at least their first language for some purpose or purposes (e.g. professional or social). This difficulty arises for several reasons. Firstly, we are dealing with several different categories of user, including the following: ethnic Russians who are citizens of the Russian Federation; ethnic Russians who are citizens of other former republics of the Soviet Union; members of other ethnic groups who are citizens of the Russian Federation; and members of other ethnic groups who are citizens of other former republics of the Soviet Union but who continue to use Russian at work or at home, perhaps because their community or family is mainly Russian-speaking. It is not always easy to define whether Russian is the first or second language of at least the latter two groups. Secondly, there has been much migration between the regions and states of the former Soviet Union since the collapse of the Union in 1991, with the result that numbers and proportions of ethnic Russians or other speakers of Russian in each former republic may have changed significantly over the last thirteen years.

It is worth devoting a separate chapter to Russian prepositions, and the rendering of English prepositions into Russian. For one thing, knowledge of prepositions in a foreign language tends to be a good indicator of command of that language in general. More importantly, the meanings of Russian prepositions coincide with the meanings of their most common English equivalents only to a limited degree. Russian prepositions are also extremely precise in their meanings. The English-speaker must therefore think particularly carefully about the meaning of the English preposition in a given context before rendering it into Russian. Moreover, some of the most widespread English prepositions (e.g. for, of, to, with) are often not rendered in Russian by any preposition at all, since their meaning may be implicit in the use of a certain Russian case. Attention must also be paid to the fact that some common Russian prepositions are capable of governing more than one case and that they have different meanings when they are used with different cases.

This chapter examines the most important meanings of Russian and English prepositions respectively, and also lists common verbs that govern an object indirectly through a particular preposition. The last section (10.4), which deals with the rendering of each English preposition in Russian, draws attention to expressions in which usage in the two languages is quite different.

Russian is a highly inflected language. Meaning is much more dependent on the ending of words and less dependent on word order than is the case in English. Without a thorough knowledge of the many flexions used on Russian nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals and verbs it is impossible not only to speak and write Russian correctly but even to arrive at an accurate understanding of what one hears or reads.

However, the difficulty of learning the numerous flexions is not so great as seems at first to be the case if the learner keeps in mind the distinction between hard and soft consonants and the spelling rules listed in 8.2.1 and 8.2.4 and takes the trouble to study the basic declensional and conjugational patterns set out in this chapter.

Declension of the noun

The Russian declensional system has six cases and distinguishes between singular and plural. The six cases are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental and prepositional. There is a very small number of relics of the vocative case and dual number (see Glossary). Some nouns exist only in a plural form (e.g. сýтки), at least in certain meanings (e.g. часí, clock; 3.6.1). Some nouns borrowed from other languages are indeclinable (9.1.12).

This book, like the volumes already published in the series on contemporary usage in French, German and Spanish, is aimed at the advanced learner who has studied the basic grammar of the language and is now striving for a more comprehensive and sophisticated knowledge. To this end the book includes much material on register, vocabulary, verbal etiquette and word-formation, as well as material on the subjects of morphology, prepositions and syntax with which the post-A-level student should already have some familiarity. The book is not conceived as a comprehensive grammar, although the main grammatical topics that trouble the English-speaking student are quite fully covered in the later chapters. The approach adopted is not prescriptive. That is to say an attempt is made to show the range of linguistic phenomena that might be encountered in modern Russian and to define the limits within which they are used rather than to lay down rules for usage.

While offering, it is hoped, a multi-faceted view of the modern language, two purposes are kept in mind throughout the book.

Firstly, it is intended to demonstrate that Russian, like any other modern language with which the student may be familiar, is not a stable, uniform abstraction that is applied inflexibly in all situations. As a living language spoken by millions of individuals of different ages from different backgrounds and in different situations, Russian exists in many varieties. Words, forms and constructions which are appropriate in one context may be quite out of place in another.

Neologisms

The radical changes in Russian life since the mid-1980s, the sudden greatly increased exposure to Western influence, and the introduction of large numbers of new institutions, habits and concepts have led to the flooding of the Russian language with neologisms. These neologisms relate to almost every area of life, but are especially numerous in such fields as politics, economics, social problems, law and order, science and technology, education, culture, sport and fashion.

Many of the neologisms are loanwords from other languages, nowadays mainly from English. Neologisms of this type may require slight phonetic adaptation, especially when the English word contains the letter c followed by e or i, e.g. геноцйд, genocide. The majority of them are absorbed into Russian without morphological adaptation, if they are nouns (e.g. брйфинг, briefing), although some (especially those ending in -и) will be indeclinable (e.g. паблйсити (n) publicity). However, the adjectives and verbs among loanwords, and also many borrowed nouns, require the addition of Russian affixes to the foreign root (e.g. вертикáльный, top-down (of management); митинговáть, to take part in meetings (R1, pej); са̀мофинансийрование, self-financing).

Many other neologisms are derived from existing Russian resources by various means, including composition of acronyms (e.g. бомж, vagrant), affixation (e.g. теневйк, person who operates in the shadow economy) and polysemanticisation (e.g. отмывáть/отмíть, to launder (money)), perhaps on the basis of some foreign model (e.g. я́стреб, hawk, used in a figurative sense).

Introductory remarks

Most Russian words have fixed stress, but many do not and it is these that give difficulty to the foreign learner. Stress patterns are numerous and complicated, but the student may take some comfort from the fact that there are patterns.

In this chapter we first set out the main patterns of stress in Russian nouns, adjectives and verbs and then indicate some of the deviations from standard stress that may be encountered.

Stress in Russian is very important for two reasons. Firstly, it is strong. Therefore a word pronounced with incorrect stress may not be understood. Secondly, there are many homographs which are distinguished from one another only by means of stress and consequential pronunciation of unstressed vowels, e.g. вéсти, news, and вести́, to lead; мóю, I wash, and мою́, my; плáчу, I cry, and плачу́, I pay; слóва, of the word, and слова́, words.

It should be remembered that in some words e will change into ё when the syllable in which it occurs attracts the stress.

Conversely ё will change into e when the syllable in which it occurs loses the stress (as it does in some perfective verbs bearing the prefix вы́-, e.g. вíшел, I/he went out, in which the element шёл has lost the stress that it normally bears (as in пошёл, I/he went)).

This chapter lists some of the Russian words that give difficulty to the English-speaking student. The difficulty may arise for any one of several reasons. For example, the Russian word may have a wide range of meaning. It may be easily confused with some other Russian word or words. It may be deceptively similar to some English word. It may occur in a plural form whereas its English equivalent occurs in a singular form or vice versa. Or it may denote some phenomenon or concept that is unfamiliar to an English-speaker.

Homonyms

Homonyms arise in several ways. Firstly, as a result of phonological change a word may come to coincide in sound and form with another word of different origin (as is the case with the pair лук). Secondly, identical forms may develop as a result of the processes of word-formation, by the addition of distinct suffixes to a root (e.g. удáрник). Thirdly, it very often happens that an existing word takes on quite a new meaning (e.g. свет).

We also include here a few words (e.g. ногá) which strictly speaking are not homonyms but which have a range of meaning that is unexpected to English-speakers.

Many of the examples given here are full homonyms (i.e. they have identical pronunciation and paradigms, e.g. ключ in its different meanings), while others are partial homonyms (i.e. they do not share all the forms which each word possesses, e.g. мир, which does not have plural forms in its sense of peace).