Strange profession
While in Azerbaijan I was learning Russian from a tutor, Natalya. I had been conjugating verbs and learning infinitive forms but unfortunately hadn't yet mastered irregular verbs. I'm a writer so when someone asked me one day what I did I answered: Ja pisayu. I got a very strange look. What I said was actually "I urinate"!Unfortunately, the Russian verb pisat', to write, when conjugated regularly and used in first person form, means "I urinate".
Editor's note: The Russian verb pisat' is indeed a tricky one. It can both mean to write and to urinate. Only when conjugated the real meaning reveals itself: the irregular Ja pišu means I write and the regular Ja pisayu means I urinate. While pisat', to write, is a genuinly Slavonic verb, pisat', to urinate, is a relatively recent loan from the French pisser. Both verbs only happen to look the same!
Sent by: Freda
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Hi, you'd better to lay stress on pIsat' (means to urinate) and pisAt' - writing is implied. That's the way we, Russian-speaking people, differ them best of all.
Ty hochesh' pIsat'? Do you you want to urinate?
Ty hochesh' pisAt'? Do you want to wtite in order to become a man of letters?
Greek is full of similar words with differences of meaning coming from differences of stress. For example: mAlaka and malakA. One of these is the adjective for 'soft' (feminine form). The other isn't.
The only form where the two words come together is popisyvat' which means both "write from time to time" and "urinate from time to time". The former form is rarely used in common language, the latter never (though it CAN be theoretically used in the latter sense). So if you for example work as a jounalist and you want to show off your exquisite knowledge of Russian, on the question "what do you do" you can reply Ja popisyvayu. This would be understood correctly and give your reply a nonchalant and equivocal meaning that would be greatly appreciated by an intellectual audience.
I recently spent two months in Russia as part of my gap year. While I was there I spent a fair amount of time with another foreign student, and between us we made several blunders. A regular one was the mix-up between the verbs 'to write' and 'to urinate', already mentioned above by other people. I frequently tried to tell my hosts that I had fallen over (on the ice), ya upala, but discovered in my final week that I had spent the entire two months saying ya propala, which means that I disappeared. Other problems arose with the verbs to sing (pyet') and to drink (peet'), resulting in sentences such as 'I like to sing coffee' and 'I drink a lot in a choir'.
It is worth mentioning that one of the Russians I met there was telling me about some of the great Russian writers in English. I became very confused when she repeatedly said that people such as Tolstoy and Pushkin were 'eunuchs'. I was fairly sure they had each had large families ... then I realised she was struggling with the pronunciation of 'unique', and had simply placed the stress on the wrong syllable.
The key here is the stress pattern that differentiates between two words that are spelled alike. One does not need to conjugate the verb to convey exact meaning. If you accent the frist vowel in pisat' then you'll get 'to urinate'. If you accent the last vowel you'll get 'to write'. Other similar examples where stress determines the meaning are: mookA, flour, vs. mOOka, torture, dOma, at home, vs. domA, houses, zAmok, a castle, vs. zamOk, a lock.
And how about English verbs: to think - to sink!? People often mispronounce 'think' like that!
I am Russian and I have some experience in teaching Russian to native speakers of English. The thing is that the verb pisat', to urinate, is stressed on the first syllable and the verb pisat', to write, is stressed on the second syllable. There are lots of words in Russian which meaning depends on the stress.
Rosy, by the way "ya propala" doesn't always mean "I disappeared". It can also mean "I have real problems"
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