Russian Language Blog

The title of the post is drawn from a list of “Stupid TV Commercial Cliches” that I found on a Russian humor site. I got a kick out of it because “idiotic advertising” has been a staple of English-language humor for generations, but in Russian, poking fun at consumerism is mostly a post-Soviet development.

Apart from its humor value, the list also caught my eye because it includes several examples of verbs in their participial form, so it seemed like an ideal excuse to talk about the formation and use of Russian participles.

But first, for those who want to practice your sight-reading skills, here’s that list in the original Russian — I’ve added some yellow pop-up hints for a few words to give you some help:

Благодаря рекламе мы узнали что:

1. Каждая девушка в ярком платье носит с собой в сумочке двухлитровый “Vanish.”
2. Люди, живущие в огромных, хорошо обставленных квартирах, питаются лапшой “Роллтон”.
3. Пора создавать купюру номиналом девяноста девяти рублей.
4. У хорошей хозяйки всегда грязный кафель в ванной, ржавые краны, кухонные плиты и унитазы.
5. Бобры, обкурившиеся альпийской травой, катаются на медведях.
6. В морозильнике может поселиться огромный говорящий пельмень.
7. Наша главная проблема — перхоть.
8. Если два маленьких ребёнка намеренно пачкают ненавистную белую рубашку, то придёт не отец с пачкой п****лей, а тётя с стиральным порошком.
9. Мозг периодически ходит в гости к Желудку.
10. Люди могут разговаривать с маргарином.

I’d never seen any of the commercials referred to, but I could immediately imagine how most of them went, because the cliches are identical to what I grew up with on American TV. So let’s first quickly go through their translations before we discuss participles:

“Thanks to advertising, we know that…”

1. Every young woman in a bright-colored dress carries a two-liter [container] of “Vanish” [laundry detergent] in her purse.
2. People living in huge, well-furnished apartments subsist on “Rollton” noodles.

I couldn’t find the exact ad described in #2, but as you can see in this other “Rollton” spot below, the brand is associated with “Cup Of Ramen”-style instant noodles — which is to say, hardly a gourmet item for affluent yuppies:

Continuing with the list:

3. It’s time to create a banknote in the denomination of 99 rubles.
4. A good housewife always has dirty tiles in her bathroom, and rust-stained faucets, stovetops, and toilet-bowls.
5. Beavers who’ve gotten stoned on Alpine herbs ride around on bears.

I would guess that #5 is based on this ad for зубная паста , which does indeed feature beavers and herbs (but no bears!):

Continuing:

6. An enormous talking pelmen’ [Siberian meat-dumpling] may take up residence in your freezer.

Presumably, the ad was something similar to this one (YouTube has a number of wacky Russian ads for frozen pelmeni, but this was the first example I found in which they actually talked):

And:

7. Our most urgent problem is… dandruff.
8. If two little children deliberately rub dirt all over a hated white shirt, then along comes their aunt with laundry detergent — not their father with a “can of whup-ass.”

For #8, I managed to find the original commercial on YouTube, albeit not with the original audio!! Rather, this is an example of a гоблинский перевод (“goblin translation”) — a slang term for a humorous озвучка (“audio over-dubbing”) of video footage. (In the goblinized version, the little kids deliver a rapid flurry of obscenities and cocaine jokes; obviously NSFW if you have Russian co-workers, though most non-natives will have trouble understanding the bad words):

Finally:

9. Mr. Brain periodically goes over to Mr. Stomach’s house.
10. People can have conversations with margarine.

Okay, fun’s over… now for some grammar!

As I said, that list features several different Russian причастия (“participles”) — in fact, three of the four categories of participle are seen.

We’ve got the present active participles живущие (“which are living”) and говорящий (“which is talking”) in #2 and #6. #2 also has the the past passive participle обставленных (“which have been furnished”). And #5 uses the past active participle обкурившиеся (“which have smoked [drugs]“). The fourth type, the present passive participle, isn’t represented, but we’ll get to it in a minute.

First, however, to deal with the obvious question “What is a Russian participle and how do they work?”, there are four main points:

1. They are formed from verbs, but…
2. …they decline and function like adjectives, showing gender, number, and case in agreement with the nouns that they modify.
3. They are “logically equivalent” to relative clauses that begin with который and express “which/that/who”.
4. They are more common in the written language than in colloquial speech.

Regarding that last item, just because participial clauses are “logically equal” to который clauses doesn’t mean that it’s always good style to substitute one for the other. Quite often, it is better to use который in speech because a participle would sound too bookish. But there are occasions when the opposite is true: a participle sometimes sounds very natural in speech, while a который construction would be clunky. Furthermore, the participles of certain verbs have taken on a completely independent life of their own as free-standing adjectives — and these “adjective-ized” participles are, as you might guess, especially likely to be heard in everyday speech.

So, let’s take each of the four kinds in turn.

Present Active Participles

These express “which are doing so-and-so,” and can only be derived from imperfective verbs. Provided that you know the verb’s basic conjugation, they’re a cinch to form: Take the 3rd-person plural present, remove the final -т, and stick on the suffix -щий. Boom, you’re done!

читать (“to read”) → они читают → читаю- → читающий (“which/who is reading”)
говорить (“to speak”) → они говорят → говоря- → говорящий (“which/who is speaking”)
жить (“to live”) → они живут → живу- → живущий (“which/who is living”)

If, by chance, the verb you’re starting with has the -ся ending, you put on the end of the participle and it STAYS as -ся in all declensional forms — in other words, it doesn’t become -сь after a vowel. So the present active participle of учиться (“to learn”) is учащийся in the masculine nominative singular, and учащаяся (not “учащаясь”) in the nominative feminine.

Говорящий is an example of a participle that’s frequent in the spoken language because it’s become an independent adjective (meaning “capable of human speech”), while учащийся has come into a use as noun that means “a learner”.

Present Passive Participles

These are arguably even easier to form. You can create them only from verbs that are both imperfective and transitive (which means that no -ся verb can have a present passive participle, since they’re intransitive by definition). Simply take the 1st-person plural present and add the adjective ending -ый:

читать (to read) → мы читаем → читаемый (“which is being read”)
закрывать (to close) → мы закрываем → закрываемый (“which is being closed”)

For the most part, these are uncommon in conversation, but again, “adjective-ized” forms are an exception. In particular, there are quite a few present passive participles with the negative prefix не- that have the adjectival meaning “un-[X]-able.” For instance:

произносить (“to pronounce”) → мы произносим → непроизносимый (“unpronounceable”)

Past Active Participles

These can be theoretically formed from most verbs, whether perfective or imperfective, and whether transitive or intransitive. To make them, start by looking at the masculine singular past form.

If this form ends in -л, you remove the -л and add -вший (or -вшийся if it’s a reflexive verb):

покупать (“to buy,” imperfective) → он покупал → покупавший (“which/who had been buying”)
купить (“to buy,” perfective) → он купил → купивший (“which/who had bought”)

If the masculine past ends in something other than -л (or -лся), in most cases you simply add -ший (or -шийся) without removing anything:

умереть (“to die,” perfective) → он умер → умерший (“which/who had died”)
постричься (“to get a haircut,” perfective) → он постригся → постригшийся (“who had gotten a haircut”)

For certain verbs — notably some of the Verbs Of Motion — neither of the above rules will apply. For example, the masc. past of идти is шёл, but the past active participle isn’t “шёший”; it’s шедший. (Cf. сумасшедший, “crazy”, which originated as a participial phrase meaning “who has gone out out of [his] mind”). Similarly, the masc. past of вести is вёл, but the past active participle is ведший, not “вёший.”

Past Passive Participles

These these can’t be formed from imperfective verbs, nor from intransitives (including -ся verbs). And they’re the participles that you’re likely to hear in speech more often than any of the others; among other uses, they are very commonly heard in the “short form” after the verb быть to express a simple passive meaning. For instance, in the sentence Книга была написана (“The book was written”), написана is the short feminine form of написанный, the past passive participle meaning “which had been written.”

And as fate would have it, the rules for creating past passive participles are rather more complicated than the other three types. In fact, for this post, we’ll consider only the most common patterns, and save the exceptions-to-the-exceptions for another time. (Also, we’ll ignore the issue of stress-shifts, and only look at the spellings.)

To form them, you generally begin by looking at the infinitive.

If the infinitive ends in -ать or -ять, then in most cases you remove the -ть and add -нный.

написать (“to write”) → написанный (“which has been written”)
прочитать (“to read”) → прочитанный (“which has been read”)

If the infinitive ends in -сти or -ти or -чь, then remove the -шь from the 2nd-person singular future, and add -нный.

принести (“to bring”) → ты принесёшь → принесённый (“which has been brought”)
выпечь (“to bake”) → ты выпечешь → выпеченный (“which has been baked”)

For -е- conjugation verbs with infinitives ending in -ить or -ыть or -еть, remove ONLY the -ь, and add -ый.

разбить (“to break”) → разбитый (“which/who has been broken”)
помыть (“to wash”) → помытый (“which/who has been washed”)
одеть (“to dress [someone]“) → одетый (“which/who has been dressed”)

For -и- conjugation verbs with infinitives ending in -ить, remove the -ю/-у from the 1st-person singular future, and add -енный (or -ённый).

купить (“to buy”) → я куплю → купленный (“which has been bought”)
обставить (“to furnish”) → я обставлю → обставленный (“which has been furnished”)
освятить (“to bless, consecrate”) —> я освящу → освященный (“which has been consecrated”)

And that doesn’t even completely cover past passive participles (nor the general rules for how participial phrases can be used in writing), but I think that’s enough for now. Hope you had a little fun with it!

The other day I was doing some reading on the Web about Russian folk-art traditions, and came across this particularly striking example of a «лубок» — a form of mass-printed illustration that emerged in the late 17th century and remained widely popular into the early 20th century:

This one has many features typical of the lubok genre: a black-on-white print with colors added by hand, produced by artisans who were highly skilled engravers yet lacked formal art training, which is why perspective and human anatomy are “naively” rendered. In the 19th century, лубки were often printed with etched metal plates or lithography, but this one appears to be an earlier woodcut, and the lettering style of the Cyrillic captions suggests late 1600s or early 1700s. The subject, presumably, is an episode from one of the medieval Russian былина (“epic poem”), depicting an encounter between one of the богатыри (“knight-superheroes”) and a grotesque hairy monster with a bandolier…

…wait, a bandolier? And, now that I think about it, the blond guy in a white tunic with a glowing sword and one hand cut off is ringing a rather loud bell, for some reason! And then there’s that “2003″ in the lower-right corner. Hmmm…

Well, of course, this isn’t really an authentic лубок from 300 years ago; it’s a humorous take on Star Wars by contemporary artist Андрей Кузнецов. Kuznetsov has, in fact, produced quite a few of these illustrations “in the idiom” of centuries-old folk art but spoofing artifacts of modern pop culture: Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, Harry Potter, Soviet-era cartoons, and even the hadron supercollider. You can find more of his lubki here, hosted at an online art site called «Иероглиф». And even if you have trouble reading the very, very, very “old school” Russian (which I’ll get to in a minute!), Kuznetsov’s brilliant illustrations are delightful all by themselves — often with an anachronistic steampunk feel, as in this War of the Worlds spoof where the Martian tripod-machine…

…is portrayed as a huge, walking meat-grinder (complete with hand-crank!) which «измолотилъ иныхъ в юшку» (“hath groundeth others into soup-broth”)

And in this one, just the expression on Mary Jane’s face cracks me up…

…as Человѣкъ-Паукъ (“Man-Spider”) explains that he’s able to stick to the ceiling because his чулки (“socks”) have never been laundered once in his entire life!

But apart from being really funny, Kuznetsov’s “fake medieval” лубки offer you a quick crash-course in the historical development of the Russian alphabet and its spelling rules — as well as an entertaining exercise in learning to decipher pre-modern Cyrillic calligraphy. (Just remember that it’s not REALLY 17th-century Russian; it’s modern Russian “in 17th-century drag,” dressed up with archaic spellings and some obsolete vocabulary terms.)

So, let’s take a stab at reading the Star Wars spoof!

Suffice to say, the medieval-style calligraphy in the «лубок» is really freakin’ difficult to make out! True, many of the letters, such as Д, Ж, and Й, look pretty much like their modern forms.

But there’s quite a lot of weirdness going on with the Cyrillic. For instance, “R2-D2″ (lower left) is a samovar labeled «РВ-ДВ». Thus, letters with horizontal lines over them have numeric value — the old Russian equivalent of “Roman numerals”!

And when you scrutinize this detail from the middle of the image…

…you’ll notice a bunch of things that I’ve highlighted in pink:

• something that looks like a Latin «S» is used instead of «З» (e.g., иsъпилъ)
• almost every word ending in a consonant sound is written with a «Ъ» (”hard sign”) at the end
• the obsolete vowel «ѣ» (”yat”) is sometimes used where you’d expect to see «Е»
• the «У» has a big loop at the bottom, suggesting one of those “FUBAR Awareness” lapel-ribbons turned upside-down
• the «Л» is recognizable, but much closer to a Greek «λ» (lambda)
• «Ц» and «Ч» are both represented by a sort of «U» with a tail on it (though the “tail” hangs slightly lower for «Ц»)
• instead of «Я», there’s a weird letter resembling a capital «A» with a  penis  third leg!

(Definitely check out Yelena’s article on obsolete Cyrillic letters for some background reading about «ѣ», the “three-legged A,” and more.)

Let’s start, then, with a typed transcript — using the “modern forms” of letters such as з and я, but preserving the old-fashioned spellings with ѣ and ъ. And I’ve tried to make some logical sense out of the chaos by grouping the verses into rhyming couplets/triplets.

Okay, that’s slightly easier to read, but not much easier for us foreigners to translate! So here it is with “normal” spellings that follow the post-1917 orthographic rules, and with punctuation and vowel-stress added. However, much of the vocabulary is either archaic or at least “much too folksy/rural.” I’ve suggested modern (or less hick-ish) equivalents for the terms highlighted in yellow — mouse-hover to see them:

By the way, the terms NOT marked with yellow are very much in currency, and are worth adding to your vocabulary if you don’t know them already! For instance, рубить, “to chop”, is an essential root-verb whether you’re talking about lumberjacks, chefs, or Jedis with light-sabers (plus, it’s the etymological source for “ruble”). And dog-owners might want to jot down the verbs рычать (“to growl, snarl”) and выть (“to howl” — conjugates я вою, ты воешь, etc.).

And, finally, here it is in (non-rhyming) English:

Of course, Kuznetsov deliberately screws up a few plot points, as though working from a third-hand oral account of the Star Wars saga!

If you are learning Russian, it is a great idea to cultivate friendships with русскоговорящие [Russian speakers]. Your Russian friends will be thrilled that you are learning Russian and can help you learn new words and phrases. When I was за границей [abroad], I made friends with a few Russians who were also studying at the university I was at, and they helped me so much. Once you have Russian friends, you will probably talk on the phone with them (assuming you are in the habit of talking to friends on the phone!), and that is what I aim to do in this post: help you learn some phone-related vocab. In the photo: сотовый телефон или мобильный телефон [cell phone or mobile phone – I believe those two words are used interchangeably in Russian, but correct me here if I'm wrong].

Of course, if you are living in a Russian-speaking country, you will probably be calling people who are not your friends – for example, if you have problems with your internet connection or computer. In that case, you may hear this: Пожалуйста, не вешаете трубку. Ваш звонок очень важен для нас. [Please don't hang up. Your call is very important to us.]

If you know the name of the person you want to speak to, you can say: Можно Владимира Владимировича? [May I speak to Vladimir Vladimirovich?] or Можно Вику? [May I speak to Vika?] – use the accusative case of the person’s name after можно. If you are unlucky, the person who answered might say Перезвоните попоже, пожалуйста [Please call back later] or Извините, он сейчас занят [Sorry, he's busy now]. If you are the person answering the phone, you will probably say Алло [Hello] or Слушаю вас [I am listening to you].

If you cannot reach the person you’re calling, you could say Когда мне перезвонить? [When should I call back?]. And hopefully, after you hang up, the person you spoke to will eventually say about the person you wanted to speak to Передайте ей, что звонил Коля [Tell her that Kolya called].

Sometimes, when you really, really want to talk to someone, you try and try but cannot get through (this always seems to happen to me – whenever I really need to talk to someone, my phone chooses to misbehave right then and there). Once you do make contact with the person, you can say: Я не могла до тебя дозвониться [I called you but couldn't get through]. The word дозвониться demonstrates the wonderful verbal prefixes of the Russian language. The word is formed from до- [action carried through to intended outcome] + звонить [to call] + -ся [the reflexive gives the до- this meaning of intended outcome]. (Just a note: the grammar book that I read to find this lovely explanation says that this meaning of до- only occurs with a few verbs.)

And I would be remiss if I did not tell you what someone would say in the awkward situation that you dialed the wrong number and said: Можно Наташу? [May I speak to Natasha?] – except there is no Natasha where you called. In that case, you’d probably be told: Здесь таких нет [There's no on here called that].

Is there any important vocab I’ve forgotten about? Do you have a funny phone story? Let me know in the comments!