Russian Pig

The Russian Pig

Pig is an important word in Russian, with positive and negative vibes. The positives are fewer. In Czech they say, “She is as beautiful as a pig!” meaning very, very beautiful, as a pig is very, very much a pig. Who can mistake a pig? Czechs have a great ceremony for slaughtering and consuming the pig, zabíjačka. Russians especially like sausage from the pig.

The Russian for pig is свинья, with that strange combination of a soft consonant, jot, and a vowel. Ask a Russian to say it for you, slowly. You can hear the same combination in платье ‘dress’, статья ‘article’, семья ‘family’, and others. The old Slavic was something like svinъ, male or general, and feminine, or lady pig, свьнь, both from an older sus, cf. Latin sus, suis ‘sow’ or ‘pig’, like English swine. It doesn’t sound that pretty and, supposedly, comes from the onomatopoeic call of the pig su! su!

Now, in pre-Slavic svin-ьja ‘pig’ the complex suffix, originally a collective, like братья ‘brothers, brethren’, has the old reduced vowel ь, which was pronounced like a short i, then jot, which is like modern й , and then a. So in Old Church Slavonic and old East Slavic, it had three syllables: svi-ni-ja. When the reduced vowels, or ‘jers’, were lost or changed to e, o, the tense jer (ь before a jot) was lost in weak position, and then the word became: svin’-ja, as in modern Russian. The tense jer left its softness in the preceding -n-, but the jer itself disappeared. The cluster of soft n and jot is tricky for us to hear. Note that the soft sign, meaning soft consonant plus jot plus vowel, doesn’t go away in oblique cases: G свиньи D свинье A свинью I свиньёй P свинье; the G pl has a zero, and -e- is inserted between the soft consonant and the jot, spelled свиней.

Russians feel that there was an old ‘i’ in there long ago, because that’s the Slavonic form. So they can and do say свин’–и–я, Соф–и–я for Софья, cf. брат–и–я. So also the Slavonic or very formal ending in учение, воскресение, vs. Russian conversational or native ученье, воскресенье (in this word there is a difference in meaning: ‘resurrection’ and ‘Sunday’).

Back to the Pig. He is a dirty animal who eats у кормушки ‘at the trough’, as many rough and rude people sometimes do, and not only Russians. The great fabulist Krylov, the Russian la Fontaine, has a fable about a pig going to visit some friends. When he went home, says Krylov, “из гостей домой / пошла свинья свиньёй”, ‘the pig went home from visiting / the [same] pig’. Very damning.

In most of Slavic the ‘pig’ is messy, morally indiscreet, uncouth, fat, stupid, and so on. Czechs say ‘curse somebody to the pigs’, call someone a pig. But remember that beautiful women can be beautiful as pigs, and that’s a high compliment indeed. Read Bohuslav Hrabal’s Cutting it Short for a deeply moving portrait of the pig slaughter, with a beautiful woman the butcher’s priestess. A little pig is a beloved animal, like Piglet in Winnie the Pooh. In Russian, however, свиное рыло ‘pig snout’ is not a complement.

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