Dealing with Stress

One of the important landmarks along the road to Russian language proficiency is the first time you proudly say Я написал статью and watch all your Russian friends and colleagues collapse in helpless laughter. The problem is not the verb or case ending or even word order: it’s the stress. You’ve just announced in not very correct Russian that you’ve urinated on your article.

Now, maybe it was a lousy article and deserved what it got, but chances are you wanted to say я написал статью (I wrote an article). As for what cats, dogs and babies do, that’s написать: Кошка написала на кровать.

These confusing words are called омографы (homographs), that is, words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, in Russian usually due to where the stress falls. The subject came up this winter when Alexei Navalny telephoned a man who appeared to be one of the team who poisoned him, and the man explained that they had spread a deadly nerve agent on Navalny’s трусы (underpants). Here the comedy — the very dark comedy — is that трусы are underpants but трусы are cowards. Some foreigners following events in the media were rather puzzled. Where did they put the poison?

With these words, context is everything. Трусы боятся сказать правду is obviously “Cowards are afraid to speak the truth.” And chances are cowards wouldn’t be lying around your house: Когда я вижу, что брюки, футболки и трусы валяются на полу, меня просто дёргает (It makes me nuts when I see pants, t-shirts and underwear lying on the floor).

Another trick for quickly figuring out which is coward and which is underwear is checking if there are two of them. Since трусы is a plural noun, two pairs of underpants are двое трусов, but two cowards are два труса.

And while we’re on the subject of underwear, Russian underpants come in two main styles for men: трусы-плавки (briefs) and семейные трусы (boxers). The latter are not so cool: Сидит Паша в семейных трусах до колен и рассуждает с моим мужем о жизни (Pasha sits there in boxers that hang down to his knees and discusses life with my husband).

Moving quickly out of the bathroom, two other verbs might confuse: парить (to steam) and парить (to soar). These days you are most likely to use the former in an impersonal construction: После шторма в лесу парит (After a storm, it’s sweltering in the woods). But you might wish to wax a bit poetic about a bird or airplane soaring in the sky: Парит чайка над спокойным морем (A seagull soars high above the calm sea).

It’s easy to remember where the stress falls in the first-person singulars of плакать (to cry) and платить (to pay) by recalling this simple truism: Я плачу когда я плачу. (I weep when I pay.) And the English pronunciation helps sort out temples and fine spirits: виски (temples) can be graying, but шотландское виски (Scotch whiskey) never gets old.

Others are harder to remember. Take орган/орган. Кожа – самый большой орган человека (Skin is the largest organ in the human body), but Самый большой орган в мире находится в Атлантик-Сити (The biggest organ in the world is in Atlantic City). And хлопок comes with two very different meanings: хлопок is a sound — a clap or pop — while хлопок is that white fluffy stuff, cotton. And be careful with maps: a big book of them is called атлас; атлас is satin.

If you make some mistakes, remember that every language has its challenges. In fact, you ought to pity Russians learning English. They have to master the pronunciation of cough, through, though and tough.