(no subject)

[wolfie-18.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to know some examples of междометие in Russian. And if there are any "yeahs" or "yos" or anyone other silly interjections (ugh, yuck, GAAAH!) that we crazy Americans have.

Comments

[kalaus.livejournal.com]

Here's a good article about Russian interjections:



By Michele A. Berdy



One of the puzzles and pleasures of Russian is all the muttered sounds that represent agreement, surprise, pain, astonishment, delight, displeasure - that is, every emotion known to mankind, expressed by a laconic м-м-м or м-да or ага or ой.

It's even more perplexing when you find them in a Russian text, and you struggle to figure out if the heroine's ай-яй-яй is a cry of pain, pleasure or disdain. But these little interjections are very useful. One magic day, your friend returns from a hot date and you find yourself opening your mouth and exclaiming "Ну?" Which translates directly as: Well? But really means: So what happened? How was it? Did you like him? Did he like you? Are you going to see him again?

One of my favorite interjections is ага, which is a rather low-brow sign of agreement, something like yep, sure, you got it, uh-huh in American English. - Ты купил хлеб? - Ага. (Did you pick up bread? - Uh-huh.)

Another good interjection to know is фу, a kind of all-purpose expression of disdain, disgust or displeasure. Ты читал статью в "Известиях"? Фу! Гадость! Ненавижу компромат! (Did you see the article in Izvestia? - Yuck! Disgusting! I hate smear articles!) When you use it to refer to a bad smell or something revolting, in English you say Phew! P-U!

М-м-м is to Russians what Hmmm is to Americans - a response that can mean "I'm thinking about it," "I agree," "I'm not sure," or "I'm not really paying attention to what you're saying, but I'm trying to seem like I'm listening." This is good to use on the phone with the kind of annoying caller who wants to tell you his life history before getting to the point of his call. Depending on the tone of voice and context, m-da can express irony, doubt or a kind of exasperated fatalism. You can translate it as humph; huh; hm; well, well; or ahem.

Ай-яй-яй, said with a wag of the head, means "shame on you," and is expressed in English as tsk tsk. Брысь! Фу! or Кыш! are what you shout at your cat when she's on the countertop and about to dive into your chicken dinner. In American English we shout Shoo! or Scat!

In both Russian and English you express extreme cold the same way: Б-р-р! (Brr!) Эй! is close to Hey! And, like Oh!, Ой! can express any emotion, from surprise, amazement, joy, irony, doubt, sorrow and pain, although pain is usually expressed as "ouch" or "ow" in English: Ой! Какой прелестный котенок (Oh! What an adorable kitten.) Ой! Больно! (Ouch! That hurts!)

And then there's Ау, which is both a call for someone you are looking for, or a response to the call. For example, when you walk in your colleague's room and say Саша! he can respond with Ау, pronounced as a diphthong. In English you might say, "Here I am." or "Yes?" But when you get separated from your fellow mushroom hunter in the woods, you call out Ау-у-у-у!, elongating the syllables and letting them float on the wind. (This reminds me of what we used to call out at the end of a game of hide and seek as children, when we finally gave up finding Danny or Billy: Ally-ally-home free! Stretching out all the words.)

When translating Au!, ignore the dictionary suggestion "You-hoo!" In fact, take out your thickest marker and cross it out. Even though it's close in sound, trust me - no one has used this in English except as a joke since 1942. Most of the time we just shout out the person's name, making the syllables last a few seconds: A-a-a-a-lex! Not as universal as Ау-у-у!, but it does the trick.

Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2003/07/25/007.html

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

I use "ai yi yi", which sounds like it'd be pronounced the same as ай-яй-яй.

[zloizloi.livejournal.com]

http://www.hi-edu.ru/x-books-free/xbook107/01/index.html?part-122.htm

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

A very useful link, but it's entirely in Russian - some hints in English might help a lot.

[zloizloi.livejournal.com]

well, I thought about it, but decided that reading Russian textbook in Russian is more useful as an exercise :)

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

The only thing is that almost nobody pronounces it like "ага" - it's almost always "аха" (soft Г, like in Ukrainian, ot just the straight Х.)

[wordsofstealth.livejournal.com]

kinda like ги-ги-ги?

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

What is ги-ги-ги? And in what language? 8-0

[wordsofstealth.livejournal.com]

isint that like silly laugh?
maybe it's гиги?
i thought i read something like that a while back

[wolfie-18.livejournal.com]

I believe you mean гыгы

[wordsofstealth.livejournal.com]

yes! oops big typo
thanks man!

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Must be in Ukrainian where и means the same sound as ы in Russian.
In Russian, there is that verb хихикать (to giggle,) and if somebody would imitate somebody's giggling, they would write "хи-хи" (while the "normal" laugh goes like "ха-ха".) This "ги-ги-ги" mightily resembles Ukrainian, though I'm not sure how exactly do they imitate laugh.

[beowabbit]

Is it a voiced h-like sound as in "Господи!", or is it a voiceless sound like English "h"? Or something not quite the same as either of those?

[ekeme-ndiba.livejournal.com]

It's voiced [h] (like Ukrainian «г») in «ага» and other Russian interjections while in «Господи» there is a voiced [x] (like Greek «γ»).

Some people really pronounce these words with a plosive [g], but this is a non-standard pronunciation (as well as «хг» in «бухгалтер» must be [γ] and not [g]).

[beowabbit]

Thanks!

[lovimoment.livejournal.com]

I've actually heard a lot of people pronouncing a distinct "g" sound there...maybe it's a regional/dialectal thing.

[juniper949.livejournal.com]

I agree that it's regional. I've lived in Krasnodar and St. Petersburg. In Krasnodar they are more likely to say the phonetically "aha" with and English like "h" sound - not really the Russian "x." In St. Petersburg, I've heard "axa" and "aga."

[lovimoment.livejournal.com]

I agree. I lived in St. Petersburg, and I think I heard mostly "aga" there.

[moonrainbow.livejournal.com]

These are the regional pronunciation differences. Apart from standard literature Moscow pronunciation where you pronounce a distinct "g" and say "a" in the words with unstressed "o", Russian language has the "northern" and "southern" pronunciation. The pronunciation of voiced [h] is a southern one and can be heard in Rostov, Krasnodar and Belgorod. In fact many people living in these regions have Ukrainian roots as well as many Ukrainians have strong family relations with Russia.

[wordsofstealth.livejournal.com]

ай-яй-яй is used in spanish too

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Well, ой is used in Yiddish, too, but I'm almost sure it's a Russian influence :))

[hound-lancer.livejournal.com]

Here's a couple of other variants:

угу - same as ага, all phonetic comment apply. There's yet a third version when you pronounce ага through the nose with your lips shut;

ого - an indication of surprize of any kind, usually when something big or important occures;

"пфе" - traditional spelling of this interjection doesn't fully render the sound pattern which can range from [фе] and[хе] to [пф] and [пх]. Overall meaning is that of dismissal towards something little, inferior or unimportant;

опа - (stress on the first syllable) a reaction to a sudden change in situation meaning things like "what a pleasant surprize", "how terribly exciting" and "shit happens". Partly analogous to "Oups".

[onodera.livejournal.com]

Yes, you can sometimes talk with someone without even opening your mouth.
You can say:
A? {What?}
Ага. {Yes.}
Не-а, where - is a glottal stop {No.}
Хм. {Hmm.}

[oblomov-jerusal.livejournal.com]

Не-а can be pronounced as two short vowels with glottal stop in between (all without opening mouth). Such pronounced, it is kind of antonymous to угу pronounced the same way but with longer vowels and h-like consonant in between.

[beowabbit]

Ah, so "Не-а" is basically the same utterance that English-speakers spell "unh-uh" (if pronounced with lips closed; "unh-uh" can also be pronounced with lips open), and "угу" is pretty much the same as English "uh-huh". Nifty. I would have never guessed those pronunciations from those Russian spellings. (Of course, nobody would guess those pronunciations from those English spellings, either!)

I wonder if sounds like this are hard-wired into the human brain from birth, or if they're actually inherited from some common ancestor of Russian and English. They're common enough that I can well imagine them lasting for several thousand years as other words like "yes" and "mother" change. The fact that they use phonemes that aren't part of the regular phonemic system of Russian or English suggests that there's something extralinguistic going on there, though.

Does anybody reading this know if the same or similar sounds are used for the same purposes in non-Indo-European languages like Finnish or Chinese or Swahili?

[oblomov-jerusal.livejournal.com]

I think they got spread across several languages. BTW, I have never realized before that Не-а in writing represents this sound.

[oblomov-jerusal.livejournal.com]

Also note that they are very weird phonetically and cannot be used as part of sequence. I think they are not really part of language, but kind of non-verbal signs, like shaking head up and down for "yes" and to the sides for "no"

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Those signs are not universal, though: for example, Bulgarian people shake their heads to the sides to say "yes" and nod to say "no." I've never believed it, but last summer I've seen it myself in Bulgaria, so I witness :)

[wolfie-18.livejournal.com]

I believe I've heard that it's also a Greek thing.

[mangiami.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure it was at least in Ancient Greece. In the Iliad, Thetis holds Zeus's beard so he can't say "no" by raising his head.

[kaersaij.livejournal.com]

My Russian teacher last year was Bulgarian. That was one of the first cultural differences she taught us.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

One of those proto-language elements definitely is the sound that little children use to describe food or the process of eating: its spelling varies from ням-ням in Russian through, say, am-am in Hungarian, to something like "nyiume-nyiume" in some Polynesian languages. The early childhood sounds in general are pretty much the same around the globe ("mama" etc.) -- which makes those who evolve the idea of proto-language believe that the traces (or sources) of that hypothetical language, arguably spoken some 200,000 years ago, may be found, among other sources, in the sounds that infants produce. There's a huge amount of works concerning the proto-language idea; in Russian linguistics, the first scholar to evolve the idea was Nikolai (Nicholas) Marr, whose theory was later denied by none other than Joseph Stalin himself ("Marr Against Marx".)
Derek Bickerton is one of those who worked on a similar theory in American linguistics.
There's a nice brief review (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-World_language/) of the idea of proto-language in Wikipedia.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

опа...

...with its 1980s teen slang version "опаньки," that derives from the Leningrad (now st.Petersburg) Mitki art group's inner slang.

[branwen.livejournal.com]

Funny, it sounds like the German "Opa", the word for Grandfather.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Happily, there is no "Oma" in Russian :)

[onodera.livejournal.com]

But there's one in English. Her name is Jgad.

[staring-frog.livejournal.com]

>...with its 1980s teen slang version "опаньки," that derives from the Leningrad (now st.Petersburg) Mitki art group's inner slang.

Ahem... IMHO Mit'ki hardly can be called teenagers, even in the eighties...

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Please re-read what I wrote:
teen slang version... that DERIVES FROM the Leningrad (now St.Petersburg) Mitki art group's inner slang

Please do point where do I call Mitki the teenagers.

[staring-frog.livejournal.com]

OK, you did not. My apologies if I have misunderstood you.
Anyway IMHO, "опаньки" is not a part of the teenage slang. Not like "стремно" and "отстой".

UMPHHHH :)))

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Please kindly re-read my comment ONCE AGAIN :))))
It says,
>with its 1980s teen slang version "опаньки,"

teen slang, you see? :)))
I'm a 1980s teenager. I know what was in the slang and what wasn't! ;-)

Re: UMPHHHH :)))

[staring-frog.livejournal.com]

Alright, alright.
I learnt this word in the nineties, and it wasn't a part of teen slang that time.
Teenagers have grown maybe...:))