Translation?

[mananas.livejournal.com]

I've heard "Боже мой!" translated as, "My goodness!" and "Oh my God!". So tell me, is it corny or no? Would it be offensive if I, an American 20 something in Russia (well I'm not there... yet), said it?

Comments

[oryx_and_crake]

In Russian cultural tradition (unlike, say, Western/Protestant) mentioning of God and religion-related things is not called swearing and is not considered offensive. (My impression is that the people who answered before me did not even catch this meaning of your question.) Lately, there is a tendency in online forums and such to write "Б-г" and "Б-же"; people tend to think somehow that this is a very pious way of doing it but in fact this is a bad copy from Jewish "non-mentioning the name of the L-d" and in Russian context it looks, well, very much out of context.

I don't think it's corny. I use it from time to time but I think I say "О Боже" more often.
So, the summary of all this is: if you feel like saying "Боже мой!", you can perfectly well do so without risking to offend anyone's feelings.

[spiderhood.livejournal.com]

Correction. First of all, mentioning the name of God is allowed in any Cristian culture, originally it was prohibited to swear by it, so you can't say something like "I swear by God I'm gonna pay ya", but it's OK to say "oh my God" or "thanks God" or whatever. This rule's been followed more or less strictly (and in more or less twisted form) in different countries by different groups of people. However, in the Bible it's like I've just told ya.

Besides that, writing a dash instead of a couple of letters has its roots in Old Slavonic language, where ye had something called a "титло" - a thingy that was actually a tilde written above some letters of the word (used to identify it). The whole construction was interpreted as a regular word and should've stayed identifiable. For example, something like "ГИ" with a tilde over it would mean "Господи" (Lord). Together with center dots it designated a number.

[oryx_and_crake]

I thought things like "Oh My God" were prohibited under "7 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain."

[oryx_and_crake]

P.S. I know that титло was used in Old Church Slavonic, but it is definitely out of context in modern Russian.

[http://users.livejournal.com/bc_/]

Old Church Slavonic being... ?

I don't think you were referring to 9th century manuscripts from Bulgaria :)

[oryx_and_crake]

Let he who says that Church Slavonic is new cast the first stone at me...
:-)

[spiderhood.livejournal.com]

Don't mix up three different languages: Ancient Russian (древнерусский), Old Slavonic (старославянский) and Church Slavonic (церковнославянский). Only the first one is the direct ancestor of the Russian language, and Church Slavonic (called neither old nor new) together with some other languages (like Bulgarian, for example) were obtained from Old Slavonic and have no direct relations with Russian.

[http://users.livejournal.com/bc_/]

The (modern) Church Slavonic spelling of Господи (when addressing God) looks more like Г^сди (it's слово-титло rather than plain титло, and it is over д).

In Russian, titlo(e)s ceased to be used somewhere in 18th century. Russian versions of Bible, in particular, use none.

[spiderhood.livejournal.com]

Ye right. I was just talking about the roots of the phenomenon.