"Cold water"

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

I learned a new phrase the other day from the Russian woman at work—хáлодна вадá. I hope I'm spelling that correctly, it was my first encounter with spoken Russian! It's supposed to say "cold water." I put the accents there to illustrate where I heard the stress, in case I got it wrong.

Comments

[vladneuro.livejournal.com]

"холОдная водА" - correct variant.

caps letters illustrates stresses.

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[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Is there any way to know when the [a] sound is actually an а and when it's an unstressed о?

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[vladneuro.livejournal.com]

well, there're several rules about [a] and [o], but i can't really explain it, coz i don't know how to do it ;) i think, someone in this community will help you with it.

ps: in moscow most people often pronounce [a] instead of [o] in some words - its like a particular feature of moscow pronunciation. so in moscow we can say "халОдная вадА" instead of "холодная вода". but only in moscow (and may be st.petersburg) ;) its like a moscow dialect, you know :)

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[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I like Russian more and more every day!

[vladneuro.livejournal.com]

Go on ;) As for me, I can't understand how one can learn Russian ;) If I were not Russian, I barely could learn Russian at all ;))

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[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

It seems like a very difficult language with a lot of grammar to remember, but I still want to learn it. I would say the same thing about English, though. It seems very hard and the spelling is so stupid, yet so many people learn it!

[oblomov-jerusal.livejournal.com]

It was probably ХОлодна вода, which means "The water is cold!"

[oblomov-jerusal.livejournal.com]

Oops, I got nuts, it should be холоднА водА. I'm not always consciously aware of the position of stress.

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Or could it be xolodnaja voda? That's what everyone else has said.

[jaspe.livejournal.com]

"холОдная водА" means "cold water"
"холоднА водА" means "water is cold"

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[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

OK, thank you. I'm not sure which one my Russian co-worker was saying!

[yers.livejournal.com]

what situation did you hear it in?
"холодна вода" is a slightly unlikely construction to hear in modern everyday speech.

and it's not the same as "вода холодна(я)" "the water is cold", it's one of those typically Russian phrases made expressive by syntaxical and intonational means (it's pronounced with a plummeting intonation on the adjective's accented syllable). I would roughly translate "холодна вода" as "now here's cold water".

I'm sure it was "холодная вода" in this case. the -ая ending is very commonly pronounced as virtually one sound, close to э.

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[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

what situation did you hear it in?

The entire conversation was in English: we were talking about how hot it was in the office and how people always have to go fill their water bottles at the water cooler downstairs. Then she just said (what sounded like) холодна вода and asked if I knew what it meant. I said "no" and she said "It mean's cold water." But I may have just heard her wrong.

Thanks for all the info!

[arden667.livejournal.com]

As "cold" is an adjective describing water, and in that unstressed "o" in russian generally morphes to an "a", the proper spelling would be: холодная вода (with the stresses on the second "o" in "холодная" and the "a" in "вода"). :)

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[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That stressed/un-stressed 'o' thing always gets me.

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[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

(frozen)

[moon-aka-sun.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it helps, once I've seen a Russian-Japanese dictionary, rather old one, and it had IPA for all russian words. It's fun to read it (for Russians, of course), but for foreigners it can be extremely useful.

(frozen)

[ugly-boy.livejournal.com]

That's really cool. I'd love to look at IPA transcriptions of Russian (and Japanese, though Japanese is much more phonetic).