Stress shift

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

I’ve been taking a first semester Russian course, and have found myself often wondering: did Russian undergo a stress shift at some point after French (or English) had already borrowed words? I asked my teacher this, but she’s a grad student in literature, not linguistics, and didn’t have an answer.

E.t.a.: I’m mostly confused by the stress of English words derived from Russian, e.g., “Russia” and “babushka”, having different stresses than the original Russian words.

Comments

[edricson.livejournal.com]

No. There have of course been some shift in the last couple of hundred of years in individual words. Russian borrowings into English are (almost?) exclusively taken from spelling, so they just follow English stress patterns.

[kehrmann.livejournal.com]

Oh, tell me please, what means and how sounds the word developed from 'babushka'? :)

[russian-bob.livejournal.com]

"babUshka" - meaning lady in a headscarve.

[ju-lia-tarasova.livejournal.com]

:) bAbushka (rus)- old lady or grandmamma
babUshka - not russian :)

[kapabas.livejournal.com]

babUshka is головной платок (babushka; headcloth; headkerchief; headscarf)

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

It tends to vary depending on region, I think, but I’ve more often heard it used for an old lady in a head scarf than for a head scarf itself.

[kapabas.livejournal.com]

since russian my native tang i thought the same :)
and it was surprise for me when my american friend said...this song about scarf... kate bush (do not know how to spell her name) song...

[alon_68]

Are you speaking about the wooden doll depicting such lady? If so, the genuine Russian name for it is "матрЁшка" that's diminutive from the name Matryona once popular in the rural areas. Russians never call such doll "babushka".

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

In England we usually call those "Russian dolls". I'd say your average English person wouldn't know what you were talking about if you said "matrioshka", but if you said "Russian doll" they would immediately think of a матрёшка ;)

[alon_68]

Of course, I definitely don't insist on using "matrioshka" in English, I'd like simply to stress that "babushka" isn't used for this in Russian.

[fallingstar12.livejournal.com]

My father would use babushka in this way in english:

"i like the red babushka scarf on your head, sara"

he'd also call it a shmata... but thats yiddish.

babushka in the way he says it means an elderly old-country (russian/polish.... my great grandparents are from that region) woman/grandmotherly figure who wears the scarf.

[miconazole.livejournal.com]

I think for three-syllable words there's a definite tendency in English to put the stress on the second syllable, so a lot of foreign words get butchered this way. Russian and Japanese are pretty good sources for examples IMO. "Babushka" has got to be a pretty recent borrowing anyway so it wouldn't have escaped any kind of Russian stress shift. I think it's interesting how the stresses on Russian names tend to be exactly where I don't expect them to be, though. Especially surnames.

[pigmeich.livejournal.com]

I'm not graduated in Russian linguistic too, but I'm native speaker and humbly think "бАбушка" is right way to stress. And it was originated as уменьшительно-ласкательное of "бАба".

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

When 7 years ago in the US I heard a sentence with babúchka I didn't even realize that I actually knew the word. Yes, the stress is shifted in English, although I don't know if that's a permanent shift or some or somewhere use the right one.

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've heard that about Ukrainian too, and the Oxford American dictionary says babushka is a mid-20th century borrowing. It gives the langs. borrowed from as "Russian, Polish." Maybe the stress is on the second syllable in Polish.

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

I know that the Polish pronoun ”ona”, at least, is stressed on the first rather than the last syllable.

[khathi.livejournal.com]

Polish indeed tends to stress penultimate syllable. In Russian there's generally NO hard and fast rules about stresses -- stress could be just anywhere, although there is a very weak trend of alternating between penultimate and antepenultimate (that is, third-from-last) syllables. Foreign words generally keep their original stress, but it's not a strict rule again.

[ars-longa.livejournal.com]

There is no such word in Ukrainian.

[pigmeich.livejournal.com]

There's so-called "borrowing tradition": most Russian word stressed on second syllable, so borrowed words shift stress to second syllable OR one syllable forward.

Examples:
Expert -> экспЕрт;
autOcracy -> автокрАтия (that's one is silly -- it's compound);
I have no time there, but hope others can follow by examples.

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

Isn’t секрет also stressed on the second syllable?

[pigmeich.livejournal.com]

Yes, секрЕт, not сЕкрет.

I must mention, that isn't official ruling, just tradition. So nowadays professional communities tend to borrow words by calque: consultants prefer Эксперт rather экспЕрт.

[spiritrc.livejournal.com]

I believe Эксперты (just like дОценты) носят докУменты в пОртфелях. While those who speak good Russian are экспЕрты and respectively носят докумЕнты в портфЕлях, just like доцЕнты. Consultants (what are those?) may prefer whatever they want, but that doesn't make it a language rule.

[moola.livejournal.com]

Both "autocracy" and "автократия" are borrowed from Greek.

[ulvesang.livejournal.com]

English stress comes ironically from Latin:

Penultimate (2nd to last) syllable is stressed if it's heavy; otherwise stress is on the antepenultimate (3rd to last).

Rus. bá|bušk|a → Eng. ba|búšk|a
Rus. Ro|sí|ja → Eng. Rú|ša (there is no antepenult so the only option is penultimate)

[khathi.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of strange Latin influences in English, BTW. Like the rule of "not splitting the infinitives", which is very strictly followed in Latin because, well, Latin couldn't. ;)

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

And a lot of those "strange Latin influences" are completely bogus, made up by 18th century grammarians with nothing better to do. The split infinitives rule is perhaps the most famous example--there's nothing whatever wrong with splitting an infinitive in English, and it's very often the way to best get your message across ;)

[khathi.livejournal.com]

Sure, but still in some circles following these rules is considered to be a good thing...

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

Yes, and we have a word for such people. We call them "wrong".

Does Russian have groups of people who go around making up silly grammatical rules and insisting that people follow them, or is it a uniquely English phenomenon? I suppose it's worse in English, being the bastard language that it is and having such a collection of genuine grammatical oddities that people are prepared to accept just about anything...

[khathi.livejournal.com]

Grammar Nazis are a universal thing, I believe. At least Russian ones are no less annoying than English. And speaking of grammatical oddities, English grammar is much more regular than Russian, which is often told to have more exceptiona than there are rules.

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

It's not the grammar pedants per se that I find annoying, more the ones that are wrong, who always seem to be much shriller and more insistent than the ones that are right.

Re more exceptions than rules: Funny, I heard the same thing about English. Of course, as far as Russian is concerned I'm still learning the rules; if it's your own language the rules have been with you all your life, so all you see is the exceptions.

[scifigal.livejournal.com]

I remember having papers marked down HEAVILY for my split infinitives.

I split away, though. ;)

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yes. Unfortunately, we also occasionally have to call such people "teachers". Personally I think giving bad grammar advice to children is child abuse, but there you go...

[spiritrc.livejournal.com]

Sorry, can you please tell me what you're talking about? What does 'splitting the infinitives' mean? How do I do that? May be it's a rule that I follow every day, but I don't really know what you're talking about. :)

[khathi.livejournal.com]

"To split infinitive" is to put some words between "to" and respective verb. Compare "to gracefully dance" (split infinitive) and "to dance gracefully" (non-split). The rule of not splitting infinitives came from 18th century (or so I heard) grammarians, who tried to imitate Latin grammar. In Latin you couldn't split infinitives, because Latin infinitive is a single word, so they've insisted that you should treat English infinitives as a single word too.

[spiritrc.livejournal.com]

Aha! Thanks a lot. :)

[khathi.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.