Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 28 – How great a
long-term impact Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Internet will have on
Russia remains to be seen, but the three in varying degrees and in varying ways
are already changing the Russian language in ways that merit attention because
the way people use words both reflects and shapes how they think and behave.
Kseniya Turkova who keeps track of
language issues for the Snob portal has written before about the linguistic
games Russians have been playing with Trump’s name (snob.ru/selected/entry/116376),
but this week she focuses on the impact he is having on the Russian language itself
(snob.ru/selected/entry/119873).
Given
what Russian television critic Elena Rykovtseva as described as the Russian
media’s decision to “feed” Russians morning, noon and night with stories about
Trump, Turkova says, it isn’t surprising that Trumpisms are penetrating the language.
They’re even being tracked at the hashtag #trampologia.
This
week the main Trump language question, however, was one he didn’t initiate
directly but rather provoked by his installation as president. Russians are troubled, the language specialist
says, on how would should spell “inauguration” in Russia and exactly what its
various verbal forms mean.
One
language site on the day of Trump’s inauguration offered a test for those
visited it. The site asked its readers how many errors were in the word otingurirovali. The correct answer was
two: the misspelling left out the letter У and
inserted the letter И instead of the letter Ы. The correct spelling,
transliterated should be otynaugurirovali
as ugly as that sounds.
In
the same column this week, Turkova points to what she says is Putin’s latest
contribution to the Russian language which he has earlier enriched by his use
of vulgarisms and criminal underworld slang.
This time, she says, he offered a euphemism, describing prostitutes who
supposedly cavorted with Trump, as “girls of lessened social responsibility.”
Russian
reaction to this was fast and furious, with perhaps the most widespread comment
being that “the girls” involved showed not “lessened” social responsibility but
rather a “heightened” one if you looked at things from a different angle. But the media is delighted to have yet another
euphemism for prostitute: they’ve had difficulty coming up with anything new in
that sector recently.
Finally,
the impact of the Internet on Russian, which has already having a greater
influence on the language that either Trump or Putin could hope for, is now
being tracked in a new study soon to be published of a “Dictionary of the
Language of Internet.ru” (echo.msk.ru/blog/govorimporusski/1917690-echo/).
Aleksandr
Piperski, one of the compilers, tells Ekho Moskvy that it is “practically
impossible” to draw a clear border between Russian conversational speech and
Internet language because the Internet has become so ubiquitous. Terms from the
Internet, and often from its English portion, are rapidly making their way into
everyday Russian.
But
something more interesting is happening, he suggests. Brilliant turns of
phrase, which Russians call “winged words,” are now coming fast and furious and
disappearing almost as quickly as they appear in the first place. That
represents a major change from the pre-Internet past where they arose rarely
but lasted for a long time.
Another
thing the Internet is doing is degrading spelling and even definitions in the
real world. Because there are no clear rules for spelling on the web, Russians
see and often copy mistaken spellings and usages that are from a formal point
of view wrong. If they see it on the Internet, they are inclined to believe it
must be true.
Asked
who makes up the audience for his dictionary, Piperski suggests that the
largest component of it will be the mothers and fathers of web surfers who
spend so much time on line that they now speak a language with which their
parents are not familiar. The new
dictionary should help this older generation make the necessary translations.
No comments:
Post a Comment