Post-Soviet Dating

Missing words

The Russian language is quite different from English. It is one of the slavic family of languages, so it is more closely related to Ukrainian, Belarussian, as well as some other slavic languages such as Czeck that have wandered in slightly different directions over the past thousand years or more. One of the peculiarities, at least when trying to translate to and from English, is that Russian does not have the verb “to be” in the present tense and does not use articles. Thus “the boy is on the table” is “мальчик на столе” (malchik na stolai) or literally “boy on table”.

This is behind the somewhat odd stilted English you will sometimes here less experienced Russian say such as “I most famous ballerina” or my personal favorite “Emergency! Everyone to get from street!”.

posted by Anonymous Jack @ 12:05 AM