Лозунг дня

Убей в себе Кулибина!

Русский язык глазами англичанина

Прелестная заметка из The Economist

http://www.economist.com/daily/diary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10943973

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It starts with the pronunciation. Aside from consonants that don’t exist in English and the “soft sign” (represented in this entry by an apostrophe), which softens the consonant before it, the vowels in Russian are big beefy things, requiring facial muscles that never get a workout in English.

For my first few months in Moscow I felt as if I was chewing pebbles. When I moaned about it to a Russian friend, he explained that “English is produced in the back of the mouth, but in Russian”—he puffed out his lips—“we speak from here, from the front. In order to strengthen these muscles,” he concluded seriously, “you should perform oral sex more often.”

Then there’s the grammar. Like Arabic and Hebrew, Russian is based around verb roots that are used to form other parts of speech. But unlike Arabic and Hebrew, it is agglutinative, so that each basic verb can swell with an array of prefixes and suffixes.

These are what make life hell. In verbs that denote movement, the prefixes work like prepositions in English—you “go up”, “go down” and so on. However, in English, since the prepositions are separate words, you can always just “go” if you want to keep it simple.

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Осторожно: обсценная лексика в конце статьи.