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> Someone took a Cyrillic adjective, treated as an English noun, and then applied an English pluralization to it. So a Russian with a deep background in lingui
by dsl 10y ago
> Someone took a Cyrillic adjective, treated as an English noun, and then applied an English pluralization to it.
So a Russian with a deep background in linguistics intentionally bastardized something so it looks like an English speaker trying to sound Russian. Clever.
An actual English speaker wouldn't even know the root word existed.
- fourthark 10y agoSure they would, it was in every silly American movie about evil Russians in the 80s.
- grkvlt 10y agoNot necessarily, you're overthinking this. It's just what anyone with basic vernacular knowledge of English but no actual Russian language skills would do to generate 'pseudo-Russian'. It's a pretty common idiom to make an English adjective into a Russian sounding one by adding '-ski' to the end of the word, and then to pluralise it, add -s to that, as in normal English. So, for many small Russian cats, we have the following: 'Kitten' -> 'Kittenski' -> 'Kittenskis' The definition of the '-ski' [1] suffix has some other examples. This advert [2] for yoghurt (and yes, it was for Ski unfortunately, and somehow they spent GBP 8.5 million on it...) from 2003 also used the same formulation. See also 'Eye Dialect' [3] used to show foreign or regional speakers in literature, or the use of a backwards 'R' character to create a faux cyrillic, Russian feel; as seen in the Tetris logo. 1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ski 2. http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/170244/nestle-comes-faux-russian-relaunches-ski 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect
- Bartweiss 10y agoI'm delighted that this whole thing led me to a discussion of 'eye dialect'. I've been fascinated by that sort of writing for years, and I never knew it had an actual name.