Passives / Transliteration

[ulvesang.livejournal.com]

1) I'm obviously quite familiar with the "active" passive in Russian, as in: "Улицу разрушили", or even: "Меня зовут ____", but in class we have now just touched upon some sort of periphrastic passive using быть as an auxilliary verb, or something like that if I'm not certain. Of course, we won't learn about this phenomenon until much later...

So, just so that I can understand it if I come across it, how does this work? Are there any semantic differences between the two forms?

2) In trying to transcribe the [h] sound into Cyrillic, is there any rhyme or reason between using г (Гамлет, гуманитарный) or х (хай-тек, Джамес Херриот [I think])?

Спасибо

Comments

[alon_68]

2) The reason is pure historical. The words loaned 100-200 years ago were accepted with "г", while the modern ones with "х".

Sometimes, it sounds very odd, e.g. the 19th century biologist Томас Гексли and his grandson, writer Олдос Хаксли (Huxley) or the famous French author Виктор Гюго and his grandson, architect Жан Юго :)

[edricson.livejournal.com]

1) It's rather formal, and often comes across as stilted, unnatural or calqued. Semantically, they are broadly similar (with the reservation that the periphrastic one allows to specify the agent); it is often a feature of written style, and all too often abused by writers to give an officialese look to the text (really only cluttering it up).

2) Not really. Generally, if you have good reason to assume that the word didn't come into the language until quite recently (say, the middle of the 20th century), it's г. Newer borrowings are universally х. The reason is that back in the 17th or 18th century the prestige pronunciation of г was fricative (due to complicated historical reason), which is not quite unlike the sound of "h" (indeed there is an old - though now seldom used - tradition to teach students of Latin to pronounce "h" as the velar or laryngeal voiced fricative). Thus words from Latin and Greek (and by extension other languages) were written with an initial г, and later the pronunciation was reinterpreted to follow the spelling. Modern borrowings tend to go by the pronunciation.

[ulvesang.livejournal.com]

1) It's rather formal, and often comes across as stilted, unnatural or calqued. Semantically, they are broadly similar (with the reservation that the periphrastic one allows to specify the agent); it is often a feature of written style, and all too often abused by writers to give an officialese look to the text (really only cluttering it up).

Well, how is it formed? I mean... we only saw it in one text, and the teacher explained that it was a passive (because most of us had translated it incorrectly), but didn't tell us how it's formed...

[edricson.livejournal.com]

Ah, sorry. It's "subject + a form of быть agreeing with it (only past and future, the present drops it altogether as usual) + the short form of the past passive participle (the one that's made with -н) agreeing in gender and number". The semantic difference between lack of быть + participle and был + participle is somewhat subtle, generally both refer to the past.

[kart.livejournal.com]

Is it unusual that the old "prestige" pronunciation now sounds like a southern rural dialect?

[edricson.livejournal.com]

Not at all. Its prestige stemmed from the fact that it was adopted by priests - not only in the liturgy itself but also in normal talk. And they adopted it because the language of the liturgy when it was first introduced was modelled on the pronunciation of Kiev, which was then (10th century) of course the centre of both political and cultural (incl. religious) influence. As the focus of the literary language shifted to more or less the living language of the more northerly regions, where [g] was (and is) the norm - and that happened as late as the end of the 18th century - the pronunciation became less and less common. Its perception as southern and rural is altogether late, and dates to the time when there was much more mobility and the central regions saw an influx of people from the south. That's basically early 20th century and the Soviet era. For Chekhov (from the south himself), the fricative pronunciation of г was a sign of belonging to the priesthood, not of being from the south.

[loga.livejournal.com]

Question #2 is a great one. The answer has already been given, but I'm going to give you a funny example.

The book "The Perfect Man," which was made into a movie in the U.S. starring Hilary Duff and Heather Locklear, has a main character by the name of "Holly Hamilton." In the Russian version of the book, she's Холли Гамильтон.

I also have an American friend Hilari who has gone by both Гилари and Хилари.

Today it really can be a matter of choice as to which letter to use!

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

on 2, addendum: BTW it's not Джамес, it's Джеймс.

[impeller.livejournal.com]

And Хэрриот, to avoid unnecessary allusions. ;)

[mytza.livejournal.com]

For 2) see also this:
http://community.livejournal.com/linguaphiles/2632964.html

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

I don't know. It seems pretty random. I have a few books of a famous writer who used to write fairy tales, and his name in Russian on both of them is spelt differently:
Ганс Христиан Андерсен
Ханс Кристиан Андерсен
I suppose in the original it was something like Hans Christian Andersen. Go figure.
Btw, even in English the same pattern ch can be pronounced differently:
check
chemistry
machine