Some interesting facts about the Russian language

This post is about the “great and mighty” Russian language, as it was characterized by Leo Tolstoy. We will try to present you some peculiarities of this language.  So, what could we find interesting about it?

1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has from 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately 8,000 words.

2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space.

3. The word "неделя" which now means "a week" actually stems from the phrase "to do nothing" and used to mean "a day of rest".

4. The only adjective in Russian with one syllable is "злой" (="angry").

5. In Russian, the terms "индеец" (native American) and "индиец" (a person who lives in India) are different words, whereas in most Western European languages they are homonyms.

6. There is an old rule according to which native Russian words can't start with the letter "a". Almost all words that start with this letter are borrowed from other languages, with the following exceptions: "азбука" (alphabet), "аз" (old way of saying "I") and "авось" (maybe, perhaps). 

7. Similar to the words starting with "a", words starting with "ф" are also borrowed. When Pushkin wrote his poem "Сказка о царе Салтане" (The Tale of Tsar Saltan) he took great pride in the fact that there was only one word there starting with "ф" and that word was "флот" (fleet).

8. The following fact would be especially interesting for translators. In 1969, a novel "La Disparition" was written by Georges Perec. One of the peculiarities about this novel is that it doesn't have the letter "e" which is the most frequent letter in French. The same principle was used to translate the book into English, German and Italian. There was no "e" in those translations. As for the Russian version, the novel was translated in 2005 by Valeriy Kislov and it doesn't have the letter "o" as this is the most frequent letter in Russian. 

9. The Russian language has only 74 words that begin with the letter "Й". However, most of us remember only such words like "йод" ("iodine"), "йог" ("yogi") and the city of "Йошкар-Ола" ("Ioshkar Ola").

10. The only words in the Russian language with the three letters "e" at a run are "длинношеее" ("a long-necked") (and other on -шеее, for example, криво-, коротко-) and "змееед" (who eats serpents).

11. The longest verbs are "переосвидетельствоваться" ("be reexamined") and "интернационализироваться" ("be internationalized"). They consist of 24 letters.

Learn Russian with So!Art. We know many interesting facts about the Russian language and are always ready to share them with you! See you!