Oddments

January 16, 2009

Oddments

Some patches of thoughts. Some words where stress in Russian really makes a difference: трУсить трУшу means ‘go chicken, chicken out’, while трусИть мукУ means ‘pour flour’. Flour is мукА, while ‘torture’ is мУка. Those of us who read more literature than cookbooks tend to forget about flour.

We say ‘pour the water’or ‘pour the sugar’, while Russian has two verbs, лить for liquids, and сыпать for grain, appropriate for a people to whom bread is so important.
Someone says to Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s The Devils: Не вы съели идею, а вас съела идея, ‘you didn’t swallow an idea, you have been swallowed by an idea’, literally, you (acc) ate (vb) an idea (subj). The object-verb-subject word order, possible in this highly inflected language, is a good way to do a passivization, and here the speaker wants to keep the words in the same order in each parallel clause.

Ободрать, обдирать ‘strip (bark) of a tree’ and обобрать, обирать ‘pick (berries), take from’ both may mean ‘steal, fleece’. The prefix o(б) has the sense of movement all around the surface of a three-dimensional object or a group of entities, objects, or people, as in обходить все мазазины ‘go around to all the stores’.

The word for ‘now’ in Russian comes as two. Сейчас is deictic, that is, it has a precise nearness to the moment of speech, meaning ‘now’, ‘in just a minute from now,’ or ‘a moment ago’. Thus its tremendous frequency in spoken Russian: сейчас скажу, мама сейчас пришла, сделаю это сейчас же ‘I’ll tell you in a second’, ‘Mother just now came in’, ‘I’ll get it done at once’. It rarely is completely cotemporaneous with the moment of speech, as in ‘I’m now in the moment’. Note in rapid speech он ща придет ‘he’ll be here in a second’. Теперь, on the other hand, is non-deictic. Its function is textual, referencing the experiential past that led up to now. Теперь я могу жить и работать как следует ‘now I can live and work the way one should’, теперь мы начнем четвертую главу ‘we will now begin chapter four’, а теперь я сыраю романс Шумана, ‘and now I will play a Schumann romance’.

The word давно ‘a long time (ago)’ is deictic and refers to the speech event, unlike долго ‘for a long time’. Oн давно умер ‘he died a long time ago’, это было давно уже ‘this was a long time ago’. In a related sense the word refers to an event or a process which took place, or began to evolve, a long time ago, seen from the speech time, and is still going on. Он давно спит, мама давно пришла ‘he has been asleep for a long time’, ‘mother arrived quite a long while ago’. It can refer to an event which preceded another past event by a long time: он давно уже стал врачом в нашей деревне, когда его жена уехала в Петербург, ‘he had already long since become a doctor in our village when his wife left for Petersburg’. This is effectively a contextual pluperfect, with давно and a distant-past P verb.

The constative past I, which I discussed recently in my аspect blogs, refers to a past event which is not deictically connected with the present moment. Я читал Войну и мир,vs. я прочитал Войну и мир ‘I have read War and Peace (and we can now talk about it)’.

Nouns, too, can have different kinds of aspectual dimensionalities. Compare ‘old house’, ‘old dog’, ‘old man’, ‘old exercise’, ‘old student’ (?), ‘old picture’. In each case in both English and Russian we have the same adjective. The word старинный adds a patina of positive value to the last period of age, which may last well beyond the expected. Старинная ваза ‘antique vase’, старинные обычаи ‘old-fashioned customs’ (this may be condescending, which is one of the ways we look upon age). Старый праведник ‘the old righteous man’ is incongruous, but старый сладострастник, or, as Connie Garnett translated this phrase in The Brothers Karamazov, in her illimitable Victorian English, ‘the old voluptuary’. In English we can say ‘the old bastard’ of a man who is quite young; Southerners say ‘this old hole’ as a kind of affectionate-augmentative. The title of the TV show This Old House names a house that isn’t necessarily old at all, but has gone through at least one past stage and needs to enter a new one.

Aspect is a way of viewing, of understanding. of entering into entities and becoming one with them. In Slavic aspect has a way of sneaking up on you and tricking you. Remember our old friend пИсать пИсаю ‘urinate’? Well, there’s a common verb записать meaning ‘note down, register’, and the past passive participle is записан. So that a записанный лифт can be a ‘registered elevator’ or, possibly, especially in Russia, a ‘pissed-on elevator’ (cf. Белки и Вова: “Нет, Белка, нет, нельзя!”)

Well.

gmc