There's a thought - vimto (and it's sugar content) cut with samogon..... You'd be probably be able to run a Stalinets military tractor off the resulting mixture!

Join us Robin, come back to the Guards. We love you Robin. Join us and be as one with us....


We are Legion, For we are many.....

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Saninstruktor Iosef Trofimovich Grushenko
or
Voennii Vrach Ibrahim Ibrahimovich Shapiro

Either's good.

I have been reading a little about Russian 'Mat'. Truly fascinating.

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Saninstruktor Iosef Trofimovich Grushenko
or
Voennii Vrach Ibrahim Ibrahimovich Shapiro

Either's good.

It really is the language of the gutter out there - some people do use it, like saying 'ax, pizdyets' when a plan goes seriously wrong. But in front of normal people, in normal situations, it's seen as like saying 'cnuting this, and cnuting that' in front of your granny. And for a foreigner to speak in mat looks even worse to most Russians, like some junkie from the grimmest apartment blocks in the Proletarskaya Raion.

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"Okay, dig out yer best booze and lets talk about me 'till the car comes."

I found an online article by an American linguist who gave an example of a thirty word sentence in which every word, (verb, noun, adjective) had the same root- 'khui'.

Wikipedia describe it as an underground language in it's own right but i'm not sure I accept the idea of a mystical and ancient origin for it. It doesn't seem much different to the way obscenities can be used in English. I spent an hour once explaining to an American what 'Arsed' meant.Nothing mystical there.

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Saninstruktor Iosef Trofimovich Grushenko
or
Voennii Vrach Ibrahim Ibrahimovich Shapiro

Either's good.

Come back to the Guards Robin... We shall raise Ray's banner and all shall follow.....Stand at his right hand Robin.....

_________________
Saninstruktor Iosef Trofimovich Grushenko
or
Voennii Vrach Ibrahim Ibrahimovich Shapiro

Either's good.

I had to be really descriptive trying to describe as to how rude it is because one thing is really true about the two languages. English is a very, very functional language - for this reason, apart from it's current cultural dominance, it's almost tailor made language for conducting business in. It's blunt, unemotional, to the point and fairly easy to pick up a inelegant working knowledge of. Russian just ain't like that - boy, when they want to get all emo and poetic they can really go for it. We can see that with the rhetoric - whereas we came up with lines such as "Having a real crack at Essen tonight" the Russians in contrast spoke about attacking Berlin as "Smashing the lair of the fascist beast."

So if they wear their emotions much more on their sleeves - even in official reports and orders - we can see that the language has developed as much more of a conduit to express all those deep brooding Slavic passions. I was talking about this with my girlfriend, and we agreed that many things in Russia and Russian culture are either black or white. A simple example - When they love, they love, but when they hate, they hate. And so it tends to be with using profanity. There's slang for sure, but there's not really such a thing as a 'mild' swear word. It's all or nothing, black or white.

Mat is really language of the 'Urki' or criminal class, and because the Urki lived outside normal society, their use of language evolved outside of it as well. They were not 'kulturny' people in any way, they were brutal and violent. If we therefore go back to the idea of Russian language being much more reflective of character and emotions it comes as no surprise that mat was regarded as 'their' tongue and certantly not that of normal people. All or nothing, black or white.

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"Okay, dig out yer best booze and lets talk about me 'till the car comes."

Rob, you are too little to remember but that is how it was in UK not so long ago. The growing use of foul language within all media in the West has completely debased it as emotional currency. Only the 'C' word remains as taboo, and good job too, so it can remain in reserve for when nothing else will do

The wikipedi description piqued my curiosity as it was so nebulous. I was still none the wiser at the end of reading it as to how this supposed hidden languagefunctioned. Similarly the outside links direct you to an apparently useful site, which again buried facts in a cloak of historical mystery and high-brow sounding philosophy. 'This all for a few dirty words?' I said.
My Russian slang dictionary mentions 'Mat' nowhere (£12.99 well spent. Not.) but I found an on-line PDF dictionary of 'Mat' ('Pizdets!') which was more use. It mentions it's use within discreetly male environments, particularly the army and cites examples, wonderful sentences of complete gibberish to the uninitiated.
This lead me to the work of 'Leningrad' and their album 'Khuinya', which I read as 'F*ck Me'. Quite a tuneful and amusing album but definitely not Ska as I know it. In bringing 'mat' into their songs lyrics I think they are aiming for the shock effect more than any other. This a step to it's acceptance into mainstream speech and it's sanitisation, a process that took approximately 40 years in Britain for the 'F' word.



PS

I don't really buy the idea of English as a language of functionality. The author Josph Conrad, a Russian, said that he prefered it's use for writing fiction due to it's flexibility for expressing emotional and personal ideas. For example he took the word 'oak' and proceeded to list the ways it could be used to descibed not just the tree itself but also a large number of abstract concepts and attributes.
At different times Greek, Latin, German and French have all been Lingua Franca of diplomacy, trade and religion in the Northern hemisphere simply due to the need of finding a common ground with the alien and that is usually the most commonly spoken language.

At the moment, thanks to the Yanks, English is bloody everywhere.

_________________
Saninstruktor Iosef Trofimovich Grushenko
or
Voennii Vrach Ibrahim Ibrahimovich Shapiro

Either's good.