Learn Russian

импотириовать (to inform)
There is no such word in Russian. To inform is информировать.

All those verbs were acquired not from English (english is relatively late influence,) but from French, German and Latin during 18th-early 19th century.

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correction:
импотириовать= to import.
but
информировать
does mean "to inform".

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yeah, i screwed up, sorry. See below.
I guess when I say "taken from english" I really mean that they sound that way and are easy to remember for english speakers. It's a little more confusing when the russian words come from other european languages but have *not* been adopted into english. My boyfriend studied German and was very amused to learn that one of the words for potato in russian is картофель.

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импотириовать= to import.

nope, to import is not импотириовать (again, there is no such word in Russian,) but импортировать :)

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gah.
typos.
The letters seem to just swim by me sometimes, even when I'm careful.

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Oh, there's plenty of early (late 17th - early 18th century) German and Dutch borrowings in Russian, thanks to Peter the Great who was really fond of those two languages. Шлагбаум (Schlagbaum, a barrier,) галстук (Halstuch, a tie,) ротмистр (Rittmeister, a lieutenant, replaced by лейтенант by now,) картофель, etc. etc. etc.

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and помидор is from French? ( I have a poster with the names for russian vegetables in my kitchen...)

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The verbs end with -овать when they are in infinitive. (However, not all verbs in infinitive end with -овать.) I am afraid that there is not any other rule.

If you look into this further, you could see that the verbs ending with -овать are usually derived from nouns

рифма - рифмовать (a rhyme - to rhyme)
колесо - колесовать (a wheel - to torture on a wheel)

on the other hand, the verb ending in -ировать are often made of borrowed (foreign) verbs, e.g.

to import (English) - импортировать
épater (French) - эпатировать

etc.

but I have no idea whether this is what you had in mind and whether this helps you in any way.

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I doubt that -овать ALWAYS marks a verb borrowed from Western languages, since there's plenty of native Russian verbs with the same suffix (баловать, to spoil or to pamper; толковать, to interpret/to explain; бытовать, to occur, to take place -- as if in "в народе бытовали суеверия, связанные с черными кошками" - superstitions connected with black cats used to take place among the people, etc. etc. etc.)
If there is a suffix that certainly SHRIEKS "I mark a Westernized Russian verb!!!" -- that's -изировать: минимизировать, драматизировать, каталогизировать, американизировать, etc. (I think their meanings must be obvious to English speakers :)))

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this exactly answers my question, thank you. It did seem to be that "borrowed" verbs (ie. ones that are immediately familiar to an english speaker with our hodge-podge language) ended that way.
But I hadn't made the connection that verbs derived from nouns often ended that way. It's very useful.

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ilia-yasny.livejournal.com

In this case from Italian. Note that many French borrowings were adopted through Poland (in 16-18th centuries), that's why they have been distorted someway.
E.g., Paris became Париж

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Wow. I've never heard those verbs, but I agree, they are immediately obvious.
Of course, the danger in all of this is that my brain might start making up verbs...I keep saying
конфирмировать (made-up russian word)
back to my CD instead of
утвердить
because it really *seems* like a word that would sound the way it does in english for some reason.

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Right, pomme d'or :) And апельсин (Apfelsin, "Chinese Apple" - an orange) is, again, from German.
The words for beets (свёкла) and carrots (морковь) are from Greek, though (acquired really early, like 13th century.)

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No, there is no such verb, but there is конфирмовать(ся) and конфирмация (to confirm/confirmation, only when speaking of the Catholic rite).

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To make things worse, "to confim" can be either утвердить or подтвердить, depending on the context; and there IS a noun (not verb!) "конфирмация", which does NOT mean подтверждение or утверждение, but ONLY the Roman Catholic ritual of confirmation! (in Russian Orthodox Church, confirmation and baptism happen simultaneously, and Orthodox confirmation is called миропомазание).

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In the religious vein, I noticed recently that
"to baptize" is крестить (makes sense).
I also learned that "peasant" is крестьянин. Is there a connection? Is this word still used in any context?

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nemica.livejournal.com

Wow, I had no idea about the origin of свёкла and морковь!

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fortunately, this is unlikely to come up for me very often...
I will try and just concentrate on remembering утвердить. ;)

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You are very good at language origins (and I am helpless at it in english)
what about (from the same poster):
артишок
брокколи
редис?

They must have the same root language(s) in russian and english, right? French?

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крестить(ся) is from крест (cross) - meaning either to baptize or to cross oneself.
On the other hand, крестьянин is most possibly a distorted христианин (a Christian) - simple folk might assume that it means "крещеный человек, тот, кто крестится" (a baptized person).

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And no, I don't think that крестьянин is used any more, though I might be mistaken. It was definitely abolished at the Soviet era when there were no individual farmers/landowners any more but all land belonged to so-called collective farms (колхоз) and state farms (совхоз). The people who lived and worked in these were called колхозники. Now there are individual landowners again but I am not sure what they are called.

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it really is a bit frustraing when russian-language learning tools use outdated words...
and it's weird that a vocabulary CD would have me learning крестьянин instead of something somewhat less outdated like
товарищ.
Sometimes I'm not really sure who picks these words that they think foreign speakers ought to learn.

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I think that товарищ is really outdated. As to крестьянин, I made a search on Yandex and got some quite up-to-date links about current events where people living in the country are called крестьяне, e.g. this one http://www.newsru.com/russia/02jul2002/aickov2.html

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Брокколи is certainly Italian, and so is артишок (articiocco).
As of редис, it's a funny story. Redish took its Russian name from French (late 19th century) "radis", which came from Latin "radix" (a root: compare with its another derivative, English "radical"!). Why Russians put an Е instead an А in "radis"? Because they already had "редька", "black redish"/"gros radis", acquired form German in the 16th century. German word for black redish was Redik then, and it came from... Latin "radix" :)

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