Profanity in Russian speech WAS Re: HP in translation

zanooda2 zanooda2 at yahoo.com
Tue May 1 03:28:30 UTC 2007


--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" 
<justcarol67 at ...> wrote:

<snip>

> maybe Russian speakers or Spanish speakers or whatever
> should think about how their native-language equivalents sound to
> their own ears before using the English ones


zanooda:

I actually laughed when I read this, Carol :-). I hope you don't 
think that we non-English speakers just walk around cursing people 
right and left in English :-)? I for one am a very well-mannered 
middle-aged lady. Alla is a young woman, I guess, but I doubt she has 
the *f* word on the ready when she comes to her law office. We don't 
swear, I swear :-)! 

The difference between not swearing in English and not swearing in 
Russian is, for me personally, that I don't swear in English because 
I *know* these words are offensive, but in Russian I just physically 
can't bring myself to pronounce them.

I was interested in this strange phenomenon from purely linguistic 
point of view, that's why I commented on Alla's post. I don't agree 
with Steve that it is about how passionate the language or people are 
(and I don't really understand how a language can be passionate or 
impassive). I mean, it can be true, but it's not my feeling. 

It seems to me that this is more about how deep different languages 
are rooted inside us, you know. Your native language is something 
that belongs to you and surrounds you from the moment you were born. 
That's why in your native language you *feel* the words, in other 
languages you just "know" them. Maybe it's not very scientific, but 
that's how I understand it.


> Carol, who agrees with Steve that Russian sounds, to an outsider, 
> like a passionate language, and thinks that a Russian accent in a 
> man is either cute or sexy, depending on his age

zanooda:

Did you hear the real Russian accent, not this fake TV/movies one?
I'm just asking because the "heavy" Russian accent sounds extremely 
unpleasant to me. The "light" variety is kind of nice, yeah.



zanooda, who doesn't think English is boring, and who loves 
everything about it, including the way it sounds, which she can't say 
about some other languages











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