capitalization and russian news stories

[fiachasorcha.livejournal.com]

This is perhaps a silly question, but one I've always wondered about.

Different languages have different rules on capitalization, and nobody ever really bothered to teach them to us in my Russian classes. I know names and cities should be capitalized, as well as the beginning of each sentence, but what about months (in a date for example)? Any other strange and unusual capitalization rules?

Also does anyone have any suggestions for websites where I can find Russian news stories (i.e. in the original russian)? I have to read and summarize them for my class, so it would be helpful if they were not incredibly long and used vocabulary at a high-intermediate level, although I can work my way through anything. I already use BBCRussia, Gazeta.ru, and ITAR-TASS.

thank you!

Comments

[oryx_and_crake]

You should never capitalize months or days of the week.
I believe that in Russian you capitalize people's names, things like countries, cities and rivers, some names of official institutions... that's pretty much it I think...
in the newspapers' names and books' titles you capitalize the first letter (unless the book name include a person's name) and put them into quotation marks. Do not use italic for that.

E.g.
Москва
Россия
Волга
Европа
Иван Иванович Иванов
собор святого Павла
понедельник
январь
романы "Война и мир" и "Анна Каренина" писателя Льва Толстого
газета "Правда" и журнал "Новый мир"

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Unlike English, in Russian you do not capitalize nationalities:

English: American, Russian, British
Russian: американец (-нка), русский (-ская), британец (-танка)

Neither you capitalize adjectives connected with nationality:

English: American, Russian, British
Russian: американский, русский, британский

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

Oh, finally. So in English you do capitalize the adjectives, this was bugging me for two months, ever since Mozilla added the automatic typo-search.

Thank you :)

[oryx_and_crake]

Probably was not too clear... in books' titles you capitalize ONLY the first letter, unlike English

[siberian-cat.livejournal.com]

Nations are never capitalized: американец, русский, пуэрториканец etc.

[malim-praedari.livejournal.com]

That is to say, nationalities are never capitalized.

[just1user.livejournal.com]

Adjectives derived from countries names and cities denoting countres, languages, locations and ethnic groups are not capitalized.
the French government - французское правительство
the Russian language - русский язык
the Muscovites - москвичи ( although it is not an adjective )
Nizhny Novgorod subway bridge - нижегородский метромост

[siberian-cat.livejournal.com]

Also: христианин, иудей, бахаист, марксист-ленинист, троцкист, нацист, коммунист...

[glorfindeil.livejournal.com]

There is special paragraph in the "Rules of Russian language orthography and punctuation" about capitalization. Read here (http://spravka.gramota.ru/pravila.html?pr.htm).

If you have any questions, you are free to ask.

[kegarawashii.livejournal.com]

For news I read lenta.ru - but the articles are really brief there.
The Channel One website (ortv.ru) posts all the news they broadcast.

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

go to reuters.ru to read news in russian. the good thing about it that you will probably find the same story on reuters.co.uk in english :)

[towarysc.livejournal.com]

Пушкин is capitalized, but пушкинские места are not.

[laertid.livejournal.com]

President, Governor and so on are generally NOT capitalized -- президент, губернатор, мэр, вице-мэр, etc, although official press and official websites do capitalize them, but it's more of the politics, not grammar :)

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

In the laws president IS capitalized however - in the constitution, for example http://www.constitution.ru/10003000/10003000-6.htm

[laertid.livejournal.com]

In official papers such as laws -- yes, you are right. But not in the press. You can tell the difference between the private and the state-owned newspaper by the way they spell the name of the local governor :).

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to warn you.
gazeta.ru and lenta.ru sometimes have rather ridiculous mistakes in them. So - if you see something wrong - don't think you're going nuts or something, better ask here ;-)

[turu.livejournal.com]

There are lot of good news web source in Russian, and I'm not sure which one should I recommend as my best (well, I don't read Russian news in Russian...X-P). but How about Google News Russia ?

http://news.google.com/nwshp?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=ru&tab=wn&q=

They launched this service recently, and it should work well as language's version.

btw, our (Japanese) national broadcasting network also has there website in Russian. You can read things happen in Japan with Russian language at there.
http://www.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/russian/index.html

[turu.livejournal.com]

it should work well as language's version.

It should work well as Other language version.

[a-garvey.livejournal.com]

Word Родина is supposed to be capitalized when you speak about country, state.

[sveta-ko.livejournal.com]

if I remember correctly the word "родина" is not capitalized anymore

About news

[zhirafov-nyet.livejournal.com]

You should try Pravda.ru. They have articles in Russian and English, I believe. But if some of them seem rather outlandish, it's because they probably are. I've come across articles on there before that seem to be quite far from the truth. Oh, the irony...