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Hang on, I want to weigh in on something… Posted by on Aug 8, 2012 in language, Russian for beginners

In her excellent Friday post about telephone-related expressions, Natalie mentioned the verb вешать — which is literally “to hang,” and in the context of telephones can mean “to end the phone call by hanging up.” So I wanted to take a closer look at вешать, along with some other verbs (and a few nouns) that are etymologically linked to it — and therefore potentially confusing for non-Russians. And just as a reminder, whenever you see black text highlighted in yellow, you can “mouse-hover” on it for some optional pop-up commentary.

Let’s start out with the imperfective verb висеть, which means “to hang” in the intransitive sense of “to be in a hanging position; to be dangling.” Because it refers to a “continuous state” of hanging/dangling, it’s nearly always used in the imperfective (technically, it’s possible to form certain colloquial perfectives for this verb, but for now, we’ll just pretend that it’s “never perfective”). Also, although it has an imperative form, in practice there are only limited contexts in which you would tell someone “go be dangling!” So, here’s how it conjugates (and note that the -с- “mutates” to -ш- in the first-person singular):

висеть
Past висел, -а, -о, -и
  sing. pl.
1st вишу висим
2nd висишь висите
3rd висит висят
Imperative виси! висите!
Derived
Adjective
висячий

Theoretically, the present active participle would be висящий, but as far as I know, the adjective with -чий is generally used instead. (For instance, “suspension bridge” can be translated with висячий мост, literally “a bridge that’s hanging”.)

Here’s an example of висеть in usage:

В пыльной темноте старого замка, крупный жёлтый паук висел с потолка.
In the dusty darkness of the old castle, a huge yellow spider was hanging from the ceiling.

And if you’re a classical-mythology geek (or just a “big drama queen”), here’s another good one to know:

О горе мне, «дамоклов меч» висит над моей головой!
Oh, woe betide me, the “sword of Damocles” hangs over my head!

On the other hand, when you mean “to hang” in the transitive sense of “to put something/somebody into a hanging position,” then you use the verb pair вешать/повесить. If you know how to conjugate regular -е- verbs such as читать (“to read”), the imperfective вешать is a cinch and there are no surprises to worry about:

вешать
Past вешал, -а, -о, -и
  sing. pl.
1st вешаю вешаем
2nd вешаешь вешаете
3rd вешает вешают
Imperative вешай! вешайте!

The perfective is just a little bit more tricky because there’s a mutating consonant again:

повесить
Past повесил, -а, -о, -и
  sing. pl.
1st повешу повесим
2nd повесишь повесите
3rd повесит повесят
Imperative повесь! повесьте!

(Pay extra-close attention to the conjugation of повесить, because we’ll be coming back to it later in the post!)

Anyway, when the accusative object of вешать/повесить is something inanimate, the verbs correspond to the English hang, hung, have hung:

Мама повесила картину рядом с зеркалом в ванной.
Mom hung a picture next to the mirror in the bathroom.

HOWEVER, if the direct object is a living person (or, theoretically, an animal), then in most contexts the understood meaning will be “to kill/execute with a noose around the neck” (cf. English hang, hanged, have hanged). For instance:

ПАША: Не правда ли, что в деревне Салеме, сотен людей сожгли заживо, за так называемое “колдовство“?
МАША: Да нетесли я не ошибаюсь, всего двадцать жертв повесили, а никого не жгли.
PAULIE: Isn’t it true that in the village of Salem, they burned hundreds of people alive for so-called “witchcraft”?
MOLLY: No-no-no… if I’m not mistaken, they hanged 20 victims in all, but they didn’t burn anyone.

By the way, Маша is about 99% correct, but she does make one small factual error. If, at some point in your school career, you had to read Arthur Miller’s semi-historical McCarthyism allegory The Crucible, then you may know what her mistake was!

Finally, just for completeness, when you attach the reflexive suffix -ся to вешать/повесить, the translation becomes extremely specific: “to commit suicide by hanging oneself.” (Shurik the inventor makes a wry joke about this in the best Soviet comedy EVER.)

That’s pretty much it for the “to hang” verbs — but as long as we’re discussing them, there’s another set of verbs that I want to cover in this post: the ones meaning “to weigh.” And the reason I strongly recommend learning the “hang” and “weigh” verbs at the same time is that they can be maddeningly easy to confuse with each other! But the good news is that if you’ve thoroughly memorized the conjugation of повесить as given above, you’ll have a much easier time with the “weigh” verbs.

Let’s start with весить, which means “to weigh” intransitively, as in “to have a certain weight.” Like the intransitive висеть (“to be in a hanging position”), this verb is imperfective (because weight is a “continuous” property), and isn’t typically used in the imperative. But apart from the absence of an imperative form, весить conjugates EXACTLY like повесить, only without the по-.

As an example, here’s a classic English mnemonic rhyme for pound/kilogram conversions, translated into literal and not-quite-rhyming Russian:

Два с четвертью фунта джема весят примерно килограмм.
Two-and-a-quarter pounds of jam weigh about a kilogram.

“To weigh” in the transitive sense of “to determine the weight of someone/something” is expressed with the verb pair взвешивать/взвесить. Again, if you know how to conjugate повесить, the perfective взвесить is a cinch: same conjugation (including the imperative), but with вз- instead of по-. And the imperfective взвешивать is also refreshingly predictable: я взвешиваю, ты взвешиваешь, and so forth, with the stress fixed on the first syllable. In fact, the trickiest part of these verbs is not their conjugation, but figuring out how to pronounce that взв- at the beginning! (My suggestion: Practice saying “the slithy toves vomited”.)

Here’s a sentence with the perfective imperative:

«Взвесьте, пожалуйста, семьсот пятьдесят грамм человечьих МОЗГОВ!» — вежливо попросил зомби у продавщицы.
«Квашеных, или сушёных?» — спросила она.

“Please weigh out 750 grams of human B-R-A-A-I-N-S!” — the zombie politely requested of the saleswoman.
“The pickled ones, or the dried?” — she asked.

You can also attach -ся to взвешивать/взвесить, which gives the meaning “to weigh oneself” — just make sure you don’t confuse these reflexive forms with the intransitive весить! For instance, a husband might say to his wife:

«Секундочку, дорогая, я сейчас взвешусь новыми электронными весами — их только что купил, на распродаже…»
«…и неужели я вешу сто восемьдесят три кило?!? Блин, не может быть! …Ага, разобрался — вес показывается “по-пиндостански”! Значит, 183 ФУНТА — ну, нормально. А как поставить весы на килограммы?»

“Hold on a sec, darling, I’m gonna weigh myself with the new electronic scale — I just bought it, on sale…”
“…and can I really weigh a hundred and eighty-three kilos?!? Holy shiiiishkebab, that’s impossible! …Ahaaa, I’ve figured it out — the weight is displaying “in Yankee-ese”! Which means it’s 183 POUNDS — well, that’s not bad. But how do I set the scale to kilograms?”

Like I said at the start of the post, these verbs can be easy to mix up. But with a little time invested in memorizing their conjugations — and more than a few hours of practicing — sooner or later you’ll totally get the hang of them! (You saw that one coming, didn’t you?)

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Comments:

  1. Fizmat:

    Is it OK if I note some corrections and useless additions for today’s post?

    >in practice it’s unlikely that you would ever tell someone “go be dangling!”

    Heh. The first thing I imagined was a woman talking to her cat stuck hanging on a tree branch. “Мурзик в третий раз за день застрял на дереве. ‘Виси-виси! Повисишь и слезешь.’ устало протянула тётя Люба и ушла пить чай.”. The second context where it can be useful is gym and a teacher encouraging a student to keep hanging on the horizontal bar. “Виси, Кукушкин, виси! Терпи, казак, атаманом будешь”.

    > Theoretically, the present active participle would be висящий, but as far as I know, the adjective with -чий is generally used instead.

    Висящий and висячий have different meanings. Висячий мост describes a specific type of bridge, while, to steal your later example, a “висящий меч” is just a sword that happens to be hanging at the moment, no different from any other sword. Later it can become a “лежащий меч” or “летящий меч”, while висячий мост that stops hanging stops being a bridge and becomes rubble. Висячий меч would be some kind of sword designed or predominantly used for hanging. But that’s a topic of прилагательные vs причастия, and I’m most probably not qualified to talk about that.

    > Сжгли

    That’s probably a typo. Сожгли with an о.

    > When you attach the reflexive suffix -ся to вешать/повесить, the translation becomes extremely specific: “to commit suicide by hanging oneself.”

    For attentive readers that wonder if there is a perfective non-accusative form of “hang” that doesn’t imply suicide, there is. “Повиснуть” = “started hanging”.

    On a side note, there’s also “зависнуть” = “start hovering” or “hang (when talking about computers)”. The root “вес/вис” is very productive indeed. As you see “висеть” can mean “hover”.

    > «Взвешивайте, пожалуйста, семьсот пятьдесят грамм человечьих МОЗГОВ!» — вежливо попросил зомби у продавщицы.
    «Квашеные, или сушёные?» — спросила она.

    «Взвесьте, пожалуйста, семьсот пятьдесят грамм человечьих МОЗГОВ!» — вежливо попросил зомби у продавщицы.
    «Квашеных, или сушёных?» — спросила она.
    In a shop you usually use perfective form. To give a natural-sounding example of imperfective in use:
    “Взвесьте мне, пожалуйста, килограмм мозгов. Да взвешивайте аккуратно, у меня денег с собой ровно на килограмм”
    I’m not sure what the rule is here, if you can, please tell me.

    Another side note, “взвесь” can also mean “suspension”, as in gas or liquid with sand/mud/dust in it. As a result, “взвешенный” can mean “in a suspension”, although I can’t think of a good example when “взвесить” can be used to mean “to form a suspension, suspend”. Usually when the situation is formal enough to use the word “взвесь”, a more formal and explicit ” до образования/с образованием/для образования взвеси” is called for.

  2. Stas:

    in practice it’s unlikely that you would ever tell someone “go be dangling!”

    In one the Russian songs there are such words:

    Видишь там, на горе, возвышается крест.
    Под ним десяток солдат. Повиси-ка на нем.

    Here is the video:

  3. Stas:

  4. Rob McGee:

    Thanks very much, Fizmat and Stan! I’ll make the necessary corrections ASAP.

    Повиси-ка на нем.

    Hmmm, so that’s not only an example of an imperative formed from висеть, but is in fact a perfective as well. If I’m not mistaken, повисеть in the past tense would generally have the meaning “to hang for a while (and then stop hanging)”. So Паук повисел с потолка would mean “The spider dangled from the ceiling for a while (and then crawled away).” But I’m not sure whether this “for a while” meaning carries into an imperative form like Повиси-ка.

  5. Rob:

    The root “вес/вис” is very productive indeed.

    Yep indeed! One could also mention завИсеть (от), which means “to depend (on)” and conjugates like висЕть, “to be hanging,” except for the different syllable stress.

    For example, one possible way to translate the English “It depends on where you’re going” would be Зависит от того, куда ты идёшь. (Although you could also translate it Смотря куда ты идёшь — I’m not sure if there’s a connotative difference between the two constructions.)

    P.S. Note that in Latin, the preposition de = “down from” and the verb pendere = “to hang”! So зависеть and “depend” both connect etymologically to the idea of hanging.

  6. David Roberts:

    Very instructive post Rob! Re. зависеть, I know it through зависит от погоды and also through derivatives like зависимость and независимый от (dependence, independent of) that occur a lot in scientific/technical writing. Regarding weighing and весить, do you think весьма (very) could be derived from it? Can you tell us anything about the use of весьма? I used to come across it a lot when I was doing scientific Russian, in fact I think I learned весьма before I learned очень, but I hardly seem to come across it at all in “normal” Russian. Is it a matter of register or has весьма simply become очень немодное?

  7. Rob McGee:

    David — according to the etymology at Викисловарь, the word весьма is cognate with весь (“all”).

    However, the verbs висеть (“to hang”) and весить (“to weigh”), although cognate with each other, have no relation at all to весь, so far as I can tell. For that matter, высокий (“high, tall”) isn’t related to any of these either, though one might assume it had some ancient connection to the idea of “hang”.

    Also, the definition for весьма flags it as “книжн.” — i.e., “bookish, literary.”