A couple more words from the birds Posted by Rob on Jul 18, 2012 in language, Russian for beginners
When I was working on last Monday’s “Name That Bird” post, in which a panel of six avian “mystery guests” offered подсказки (“hints, clues”) to their identity, I considered a longer list of birds but ended up cutting some of the feathered panelists just to avoid making the post too long. For instance, фламинго and пингвин didn’t make the final cut because their names are pretty obvious — I gave precedence to birds with distinctively Russian names.
But in the process of trimming, I also got rid of a few interesting words and phrases that some of the birds had used in their clues, and I thought that two of them were useful enough to have a post of their own:
клевать — “to peck (as a bird does with its beak)”
вить (гнездо) — “to build (a nest)”
You may think, “Useful? How many times am I likely to need the verb for to peck when I’m struggling through a conversation in Russian? And unless I’m actually breeding parakeets or whatever, is it terribly important that I know how to say build a nest?”
But what makes these two verbs useful is that learning their conjugations will teach you (or reinforce) the conjugations for a bunch of other verbs that follow the same pattern.
Let’s take вить (“to make by twisting”) first. The past tense is easy, apart from the fact that the stress shifts to the end in the feminine:
вил, вила, вило, вили
In the present, the ви- changes to вь-, but otherwise it behaves like a normal, end-stressed -е- verb:
я вью, ты вьёшь … они вьют
And the imperative is:
Вей(те!)
If this seems vaguely familiar, it’s possibly because вить follows the same “inflectional paradigm” as пить (“to drink”). Or, for that matter, there’s бить (“to beat”) and лить (“to pour”) and шить (“to sew”).
Quick, how do you say “We are sewing” in the present tense? Well, if you’ve already learned that the 1st-person plural present of вить is (мы) вьём, then the answer is a cinch: мы шьём. Similarly, once you know the imperative вей(те), you’ll have no trouble telling someone “Pour some beer and drink it!”
Although it can be translated “to build” when it’s followed by гнездо (“nest”), more literally вить means “to construct by weaving or twisting.” But when you put the reflexive -ся suffix on it, it can mean “to grow in a twisting manner” or “to move in a twisting way”:
Кошка вьётся у моих ног и громко мяукает
(“The cat is winding around my legs and meowing loudly.”)
Вить is also the root of вьюга — a “whirling, twisting blizzard.” And it forms various other verbs by prefixing — of which the most important one for a foreign student is probably развить, “to develop,” with the imperfective развивать.
By the way, you may know that the prefix раз- can sometimes correspond to English un-, so the original and literal meaning of развить was basically “to unravel.” It may seem strange that a word that literally refers to a rope falling apart would eventually be used in the secondary sense of “develop.” But consider English examples like Let’s wait and see how the situation unfolds — where you could replace “unfolds” with “develops” without changing the meaning.
Moving on to клевать (“to peck”), it’s also a good word to learn as a model verb with a slightly unusual conjugation. The past tense, again, is no sweat:
клевал, клевала, клевало, клевали
But in the present, it’s:
я клюю, ты клюёшь … они клюют
The 3rd-person plural form, by the way, figures into the expression У кого-нибудь денег куры не клюют — which is literally “The chickens don’t peck for money at so-and-so’s house,” and signifies that someone is quite wealthy and has “money to burn.”
And if you needed to tell a bunch of chickens to start pecking, the imperative would be:
Клюй(те)!
Once again, maybe that conjugation pattern looks slightly familiar. Do you know the easy verb парковать (“to park a car”)? It conjugates я паркую, ты паркуешь… — in other words, essentially like клевать, except the latter happens to have a stem ending in a soft consonant, and thus it has -ю- instead of -у- in the present-tense conjugation, and it also happens to be end-stressed.
And that same -евать pattern is also found in some very commonly used verbs, such as плевать (“to spit”); воевать (“to fight”); жевать (“to chew”); горевать (“to mourn, grieve”); and the somewhat gross-sounding and déclassé блевать (“to puke; to barf; to blow chunks; etc.”).
For the most part, these behave like клевать, although take note that жевать conjugates жую, жуёшь…, and not жюю, жюёшь…, in accordance with Russian spelling rules. Also, for some reason, verbs related to vomiting tend to be used in impersonal constructions in Russian. So “Look out, I’m gonna puke!” would be Меня блюёт!, not the logically expected Я блюю!
Not all verbs with infinitives ending in -евать have the distinctive conjugation -юю, -юёшь… of verbs like клевать, however: зевать (“to yawn”) is, in the present tense, я зеваю, зеваешь… And, similarly, сомневаться (“to doubt”), which conjugates сомневаюсь, –аешься, etc., and переодевать (“to disguise as”), which is переодеваю, -ваешь, etc.
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Comments:
David Roberts:
Excellent, and very useful on how some евать and овать verbs keep the ев or ов. Many years ago when i was doing наукний русский” I was told – if your trying to talk Russian and you don’t know the verb, start from the english and “Russify” it by adding the ending -ировть, which conjugates as -ирую. Particularly if you’re talking technical stuff, you will usually be understood. And you can make the corresponding abstract nouns by changing -ировть to -ирование. If you hadn’t told us otherwise, I’d have used паркирую for I park and паркирование for parking (the act of). How would you say “reverse parallel parking is easy when you’ve got the knack” in Russian?
Говоря о птицах, one of the birds you decided to leave out was пингвин. This is a truly международное слово, but its parent language is one I’m particularly fond of, though not very competent at. It is, as far as I know, the only word that Welsh has given to the rest of the world. It comes from pen = head and gwyn = white. OK, but if you look at a penguin or a picture of one, you realise that its head is black, not white! The best explanation I’ve heard is that the original pengwyn was a name given by Welsh sailors to a northern hemisphere bird that flies, does have a white head, and otherwise looks a bit like a penguin. So the name got transferred when the flightless black-headed pengwynau were discovered in Antarctica.
Here’s a question for polyglots – what european language has a name for these birds that is nothing like penguin?
samonen:
Раз+вить in the sense of ‘to develop’ is not strage at all, because développer/ to develop is about the same. In fact this is the case in all the Indoeuropean languages I know:
entwickeln (German)
utveckla (Swedish)
développer, develop (French, English)
desarrollar (Spanish)
sviluppare (Italian)
развить (Russian)
Rob:
Thanks, Samonen! I would guess that this is an example like English “skyscraper,” which has been calqued into dozens of different languages with the literal meaning “to scratch the heavens”.
From checking online dictionaries, I find that French développer may have been the original word that was later borrowed by calquing into Russian and other languages. (I guess technically this would be an example of “semantic calquing,” since развить probably already existed in Russian with the concrete meaning “to unravel; to become untwisted” but the abstract/figurative sense was taken from the French.)
Rob:
David — do you know if the Welsh origin for “penguin” has been conclusively proven? I’ve also heard Latin pinguis (“plump; fat”) given as a possible etymology. Since Latin was a historic lingua franca for scholars and Welsh was not, one might be inclined to favor the Latin origin; on the other hand, the inflected forms of pinguis did not have an -n- added to the end (for example, nom. pl. is pingues, not pinguines). So that’s reason to favor Welsh pen gwyn.
Checking Wikipedia, the English article mentions both the Latin and Welsh possibilities, but doesn’t clearly favor either one. I don’t know the answer to your last question, though!
Rob:
P.S. Also, David, паркировать and паркирование do get some hits with Google, but they’re vastly outnumbered by парковать and паркование — and the overwhelmingly preferred noun form for the “act/process of parking a vehicle” is парковка (tens of millions of hits, versus under 100,000 for паркование). So your basic instinct was correct, although not the preferred forms in Russian.
David Roberts:
Rob, what a disturbing thought, that possibly Welsh has’t given ANY words to the rest of the world! I rest my hopes on the fact that penguin doesn’t sound like a “scholars’ word”, and the zoologists’ name doesn’t look anything like penguin. And when penguins were discovered would have been in the days when Britannia ruled the waves.
French is the language that prefers a different word, manchot, although they also have pingouin.
David:
Rob, I’ve also remembered that pingüe, obviously from Latin pinguis, is a Spanish word for fat or fatty (as an adjective). And penguins do live near Argentina! However there is a Welsh speaking colony in the Patagonia region of Argentina.
nabl83:
Hello! I’m native speaker of Rassian. And I want to meet with native speaker of English for best learn the languages. You can found me in skipe as – nabl83 (Kazahstan). Thank you beforehand.
Здравствуйте! Я носитель русского языка. И хочу познакомиться с носителем английского для лучшего изучения языков. Вы можете найти меня в скайпе как – nabl83 (Казахстан). Заранее спасибо.
Russel:
>So “Look out, I’m gonna puke!” would be Меня блюёт!, not the logically expected Я блюю!
You are wrong. On the contrary, the right expressions would be я блюю и меня рвёт.