Russian Blog

Do you remember David Roberts of the “Million Scarlet Roses” post? He’s back with more and I mean lots more insight into Russian language. And don’t be fooled by the title of the post. You will learn way more than 10 little words. And that’s just in Part 1. So here it goes…

Grammatical gender is not too much of a problem in Russian, because there are simple rules to tell the gender from the ending. So if a noun ends in «–а» or «–я» it’s usually feminine, and if it ends in «–о» or «–е» it’s neuter. But there’s another group of neuters.

If you’re a native English speaker learning Russian you may have come across a statement in books along the lines: “There are ten neuter nouns ending in «–мя»; the most important of these are «имя» [name] and «время» [time]”. Maybe you’ve wondered “what are the others?” If you’re a native Russian speaker, you may not have known that there are ten of these nouns, you may not be able to list them all immediately, but you almost certainly can recognize all of them and can use all of them easily if the occasion arises.

I think these ten «–мя» nouns have a fascinating story to tell, and in this article we will cover:

- what are the other ones besides «время» and «имя»;

- how to remember them by using mutation rules to find relationships with English words;

- how these feminine-looking nouns come to be neuter and not feminine.

While doing all this we will get some glimpses into how Russian relates to other Slavonic languages. We (native English speakers included) may even learn one or two new English words.

Native users of any language have a vocabulary of words that everyone knows and that most people use almost every day. «Имя» and «время» come into that category, so unless you’ve only just started learning Russian, you know those already. But all native speakers have a much wider vocabulary than that: they have a repertoire of words that they may not use or hear for months or even years, but when the need arises, they can understand and use these words without thinking about it.

You can guarantee that during any normal day, talking to people, reading the newspaper, watching television, etc, you will encounter plenty of words in this category – you just can’t predict which ones they will be. For example, «молот» [hammer], «серп» [sickle], «пустыня» [desert] – these days the first two tend to be in the last one; opinions vary as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. All of the «–мя» nouns except «имя» and «время» fall into this category of always available but rarely used words.

So here they are, in alphabetical order. They all have two syllables, and stress in the singular is always on the first syllable.

1. Бpемя
2. Вpемя
3. Вымя
4. Знамя
5. Имя
6. Пламя
7. Племя
8. Семя (not to be confused with «Семья» [family])
9. Стремя
10. Темя

Before we go on to the meanings and how to remember them, here’s a reminder of how they decline, illustrated by «племя» (tribe):

In fact only «время», «имя» and «племя» follow this pattern exactly. But they all have the same pattern in the singular, and they all have the «–ен-» infix for all cases except the nominative and accusative singular.

You may have noticed that in the singular the genitive, dative and prepositional cases, quite apart from the «–ен-» infix, the endings are not what we normally expect for neuter and masculine nouns (genitive «-а» or «–я»; dative «-у» or «–ю»; prepositional «–е»). Normally the genitive ending «–и» indicates a feminine noun. However, in the Proto-slavic times that these nouns date back to the declension system was more complex than in modern Russian, and several groups of masculine and neuter nouns had declension endings similar to the ones above, without the «–ен-» infix. A masculine survivor (maybe the only one) is «путь» [path, way], which declines:

Remembering words by finding relationships – Mutation rules

Most European languages have evolved over several thousands of years from an ancestral indo-European language. Words can change over time, by small steps that eventually lead to words that look and sound completely different. I find that by trying to find how words in different languages are connected, I remember them more easily. Sometimes there seems to be no connection, and one reason for this is that European languages, particularly Russian and Spanish (which has a large number of words from Arabic), have acquired loan words from contacts with non-European languages.

An example is «карандаш» [pencil], which comes from the Turkic language group. In modern Turkish kara is black and taş (ş is equivalent to ш) is stone. However, I often find that even if the attempt is unsuccessful, the very act of trying to find a connection helps to fix the word in my mind.

No two people pronounce words exactly the same. In an isolated population, one type of pronunciation becomes dominant, and in a different population a different type of pronunciation becomes dominant. For example, the American English and the British English pronunciation of words like “water” and “city” are different. As a result, over the several thousand years that the European languages have been evolving from an original common language, populations that are separated from each other come to speak differently from each other, eventually to the point where the two populations cannot understand each other. By thinking about what sounds can easily mutate into others, we can see relationships that at first glance don’t seem obvious.

We can sort sounds into groups in which they can easily mutate into each other. Take, for example, d and t, plus the two English sounds represented by “th”. We only need to consider consonants – vowels are all easily mutated into each other and can appear and disappear. The word «путь» above is a simple example – mutate «т» to “th”, change the  vowel, and we get “path”. There are several groups of easily mutating consonants, and there are often “bridges” between groups. For our purposes, the two most important groups are:

The “l, r, w” group and the “p, b, v, f, m” group

The “l, r, w” group is fairly obvious – in most oriental languages there is no distinction between l and r, and in Polish the w sound, represented by ł, is treated as a variant of l. The sounds of w and v can easily mutate into each other, so here we have a “bridge” between the “pbvfm” group and the “lrw” group.

The similarity of p, b, v and f is fairly obvious, but m may look a bit surprising at first. However, m interchanging with b and v is a regular mutation in the Welsh language (Welsh, the descendent of the language spoken by the British until about 1500 years ago, has a grammar where the first letter of a word often mutates depending on the word’s role in the sentence – this can make using a dictionary difficult), and another example of this mutation is in the name change of one of India’s major cities – Bombay is now Mumbai. If you’re still not convinced, think about those Russian verbs that insert «л» (only in the first person singular if it’s an и-conjugation verb, throughout if it’s an е-conjugation verb). These are verbs with stems ending in:

«б» – любить [love] – люблю, любишь, любит, любим, любите, любят. Notice how the stress is on the –ю ending in the first person singular but is on the stem in all the other forms. This applies to all и-conjugation verbs that insert this «л».

An e-conjugation example is «колебаться» (oscillate, hesitate, waver) – «колеблюсь, колеблешься, колеблется, колеблемся, колеблетесь, колеблются». Notice how the inserted «л» is present throughout the conjugation.

«в» - ставить [put] – ставлю, ставишь, ставит, etc.

«п» - утопить [drown] – утоплю, утопишь, утопит, etc. and спать [sleep] – сплю, спишь, спит, etc.

An e-conjugation example is «трепать» [tousle, dishevel] – треплю, треплешь, треплет, треплем, треплете, треплют

«ф» - графить – графлю etc. [rule a line on paper] (rather an obscure verb, but verbs with stems ending in ф are rare – in fact ф is one of the least used letters in the Russian alphabet).

«м» - кормить [feed] – кормлю, кормишь, etc.; дремать [doze] – дремлю, дремлешь, дремлет, etc.

So no other consonants, but м б в п ф, trigger the so-called epenthetic л. If you want to remember the word epenthetic and its corresponding noun epenthesis, referring to a sound that gets inserted inside a word, think of it as the opposite of parenthetic/parenthesis. Parentheses are put outside of a word, and an epenthetic letter is put inside of a word. The epenthetic л seems to make the –ю and –е sounds easier to pronounce than if they follow м, б в, п, or ф directly, and that is probably how it came to be a regular feature of the language. In some dialects it is not used.

Knowing that м can be inter-mutated with м б в п ф is very useful when looking for connections.

So, to look for relationships between unfamiliar looking words in Russian and words that we know in Western European languages, we play around with swapping p, b, v, f and m, and swapping l, r and w. Here is an example: «муравей».

At first sight this doesn’t look like anything we recognise, but mutate the initial м to ф, mutate в to м, change to the Latin alphabet, and we get fouramey. Get rid of the middle a, modify the other vowels slightly, and we have fourmi, which is French for “ant” (if you don’t know French, you may have heard of formic acid, which is made by ants for chemical warfare). The original proto-European word for ant, whatever it was, must have undergone several mutations over the millennia to end up as modern French fourmi and Russian «муравей».

What about the normal English word “ant”? This is nothing like «муравей» or fourmi, and this is because names were made up for these insects on two occasions, by two different populations already speaking different languages. This is an example of another reason why looking for connections doesn’t always work. “Ant” has Germanic roots, and the original word was related to their being biting insects. The ancestor of «муравей» and fourmi was derived from the smell of an ant nest. Nevertheless, it turns out that there is a connection between «муравей» and an English word – it was just that the English word is so specialised that I’d never heard of it. The word is myrmecology, meaning the study of ants.