The most interesting facts about the Russian language
The Russian language is one of the most complex languages in the world. It is spoken not only in the former USSR countries but outside them as well. Russian is one of the UN working languages. This language belongs to the Indo-European group, there is a correlation with languages such as Latin and Greek. Its obvious “relatives” are Ukrainian and Belarusian . As any language, it contains a lot of loanwords from German, French, English, other languages which enriches Russian substantially.
The Russian language has many mysteries.
Its alphabet contains letters which are similar to the Latin ones in shape but differ in pronunciation. Besides, there are letters which are not pronounced at all («Ь» and «Ъ»), while some letters convey several sounds - «Ё» - [йо] and «Е» - [йэ]. As for the letter «Ё», it can be replaced by the letter «Е» in writing, which does not cause any difficulties with native speakers.
As for the ways of addressing people, here you will come across some problems. Not long ago the universal word for addressing everybody was “comrade”. But currently it is not used making way for “Mr.” or “Mrs.” but these words still sound unnatural and out of place. Still common are such addresses as “woman” or “man” which, to my mind, sound quite rude. The modern Russian language has not provided us yet with a universal word and in each particular case people are looking for a suitable form.
The verb “to be” is also worth mentioning.
As opposed to other
languages, at present it is used in Russian only in the past and
future.
The Russian sentence or, to be more exact, the order of words make
another curious topic. The word order in the sentence is free and the
word which the speaker considers most important can be either stressed
or put in the first place in the sentence. Thus, for example, a famous
philosophical statement “social being determines consciousness”
translated into Russian can be interpreted differently depending on
the stressed word.
The construction of interrogative sentences has no formal features.
The same sentence can be a confirmation or a question depending on the
intonation in oral speech or an interrogation sign in writing.
Speaking of the numerals, it should be mentioned that “1” and “2” have
special forms for feminine and masculine depending on the following
noun. As for verbs, they do not have gender in the present tense but
have it in the past.
Rather funny (sometimes even mystical) looks the grammatical category
of animateness, for example, there are three Russian words denoting a
dead person but one of them is considered inanimate while the other
two are animate.
The spelling of Russian words also presents difficulties and once
Catherine the Great (the famous Russian empress) manages to make 8
mistakes in the word consisting of three letters.
Russian is also renowned for its tongue twisters.
