The Russian blog community is a fascinating world of general discussions, private reflections and random efforts to earn an extra ruble or two – in short, just like in all other blog communities around the world. In Russia there’s still some ambivalence about what to exactly call this ‘action’ (once again we’re back at the beloved subject of Russian verbs, and now for some more profound reflections, as I promised last week). Blogs are usually visible in many other media outlets in Russia, most of all in magazines and papers, for example «Русский репортёр» always reserves at least a whole section just for blog comments on some current affair. For a long time I didn’t understand what the word «ЖЖ» meant, which I met often in different contexts, as I couldn’t for all my life imagine what these two letters stood for. Later it was explained to me that it stood for «живой журнал» [live journal] which is a straight translation of the most popular blogging site’s English name into Russian – www.livejournal.ru. But is there any verb for ‘to blog’ in Russian? Mostly when I heard Russians speak of this new action, they called it «вести дневник он-лайн (или по интернету)» [to keep a journal on-line (or on the internet)], it was only later that the English word made it into the Russian language completely – «блог» [blog]. Since saying the whole sentence above every time you’ve blogged or when you’re about to blog takes a lot of time and effort, I started to shorten it down to «блоговать» [“to blog”] and for a long time, almost six months now, have I been thinking that this creation was something all of my own. Little did I know that many other Russians, just like myself, blog too much and too frequently to say more than one word, and that discussions about this new verb have been going on for sometime now. Read more about that here and here. As of yet it is unsure when this new word is going to become an official part of the «великий и могучий» Russian language, as it is a rather conservative tongue. But one can always hope that the following will become a common thing to be heard both in villages on the Don and in the suburbs of Saint Petersburg: «я блогую, ты блогуешь, он блогует, мы блогуем, вы блогуете, они блогуют».

Since Russian is a language that loves to put different prefixes on verbs, here’s a little list of suggestions of ways to make a perfect verb out of the imperfective «блоговать»:

«Поблоговать» since the prefix «по» is a very common way of making the perfect of form of a verb, as, for example, in «поговорить» [to talk (once), to talk (a little), to talk (not for very long)]. Using the perfect you can make a sentence with all verbs in the future tense, like this:

«Я просто немножко поблогую, потом тебе позвоню» [I’ll just blog a little, and then I’ll call you]

«Заблоговать» with the prefix «за», which usually stands for the beginning of an action, as in «задуматься» [to begin thinking about something, to start pondering on something].

«Это я заблоговала о проблемах системы образования России!» [It was I who began blogging about the problems of the eductional system of Russia!]

And then there’s a perfect version that’ll probably only become popular and often used in the future: «разблоговать». It has the prefix of «раз», which is a rather ambigious prefix with different meanings, but in this case it means ‘to stop doing something’ as in the verb «разлюбить» [to stop loving].

«Я разблоговал после того, как все стали блоговать… Неинтересно, когда кто попало может высказать своё мнение о чём попало!» [I stopped blogging after everybody started blogging… It is uninteresting when whoever can tell their opinion about whatever!]