I was aware of the Kamchatka indigenous Itelmen people's fall festival of Alkhalalalai, a sort of thanksgiving festival, and I had been encourged to attend it, but I only just now found out what the name means. 

"We want women with big breasts."

Apparently, the traditional response by the women, after the men shout "Alkhalalalai":

"We want men with nice moustaches."

(Nietzsche would have been very popular among the women on Kamchatka.)

(Now THERE'S an Itelmen moustache to tell your girlfriends about!  Image from a Kamchatka travel company.)

Learn more about the Itelmen people, including photos of Alkhalalalai.

Learn more from the indigenous Russian organization RAIPON about the indigenous peoples of the Russian North.

I am very entertained by what word Abby Lingvo 11 came up with when I went to it for help with a word I was trying to pull out of some messy handwriting by one of our otherwise impressive partners in Koryakia.

The word looked like poligia, but all I could come up with was polygyria.

Полигирия which translated in Abby Lingvo as polygyria.

The actual word I needed - which my native-Russian-speaking coworker helped me deduce- was just наличия - the genitive form of the familiar word наличие -  "acquisition." 

So, what the hell does it mean if you have an "excessive" number of convolutions in the brain?

 

I just ran across this cool new (to me) Russian phrase.  Сыр-бор.  I
saw it first in the Katzner dictionary and then corroberated it in the
on-line (woohoo!) Ozhegov dictionary.


       СЫР-БОР         откуда (из-за чего) сыр-бор загорелся (разг, часто ирон.) -
из-за чего все произошло, началось. Весь сыр-бор загорелся из-за
пустяков.

Now, the proper translation of the popular (per my recent Googling of
the phrase) version "почему весь сыр-бор разгорелся" would probably be
something like "why the whole damn thing went to hell," or, literally,
"why the whole pine woods was burned down."

But, my first reading of the phrase was much more entertaining.  Сыр =
cheese.  Бор is a root word in сбор which means collection.

So, the phrase in my Russian-as-a-second-language first take:

 "why the whole damn cheese collection was set on fire."

(One of the wonderful images you get if you search "cheese fire.")

On this Thanksgiving I'd like to give thanks for the teachers of language who have paved my way to near-fluency in Russian, especially my first second language teacher, Kitty Cook (then Frau Williams).  I'd like to thank the patient friends and colleagues who have tried to support and improve my Russian.  Thank you to my parents for letting me take Spring Break 1989 in the Soviet Union, at age 15.  Thank you to the academics who have come before me to produce good translation aids like Kenneth Katzner's dictionary, the only American English /Russian dictionary (of which I have so many copies I've lost count-- I'm not sure quite how they have accumulated the way they have-- everywhere I turn there's one within reach).  Having Russian in my life has made this small town girl's world incredibly worldly.

Thank you.

1.  I had a bit of interpreting on the job yesterday-- both Russian to English and back again.  It always makes that language gap open up for the falling in.  Later in the day I was meeting with coworkers to talk (in English) about a document I'm drafting.  The question I needed to answer was who the audience was for the document- Russians or English speakers.  I tried to ask if it was for an "Englage" speaking audience.  I tried!   But I just couldn't say "English language."  Then, nobody in the meeting seemed to be able to spit out "English language."  Everyone was saying "Englage." 

2.  I always have a block whenever I try to remember the Russian word for "obstacle."

3. I recently learned of another gorgeous French word that has made itself a home in Russian.  Pissoire.  Писсуар.  (Urinal.)  Love those French imports.

I realized the other day I posted about our annual Russian environmental organizational partners meeting and didn't explain the name.  We call it "Sosnovka" because the first year it was held (1998) it was in Sosnovka, Russia.  What's funny is that there is no intention to ever have it there again, and also there are a LOT of little towns named "Sosnovka" all throughout the Russian Far East.  So, the joke runs that the Secret Police go to Sosnovka - or all the Sosnovkas - every year waiting for us to return.

Sosnovka as a word is derived from "sosna" or pine tree.  We refer to participants as Sosnovtsy (one participant = Sosnovets).  The new program we're launching to bring in younger people to mix in with the organizational leaders is being playfully called the "pinecone" program (the "shishki").

Here's the web page of my organization that explains the Sosnovka Coalition (in Russian).

Here we are, in the Altai, in the rain:

This is your (English-speaking) brain on Russian.

Signs between Monterey and Big Sur, California, abbreviate canyon as "Cyn."  It was several trips down those roads before I finally decyphered the abbreviation.  My brain could not read that word as anything other than the Russian word for soup.  Суп.

I like this sign in particular, because Fern Soup kind of sounds tasty.  With pepper and fennel and maybe some quinoa?  MMmmmm.  Fern суп.



I fall between my native English and my adoptive Russian sometimes.  More often I latch on to the correct words and pronunciations and spellings when I need them.  But I do have a shyness that comes out when I find myself in mixed company - non-English-speaking Russian-speakers and non-Russian-speaking English-speakers.  I am a) not sure I want to be assumed to be one or the other (it can be a strategic mistake to pass as either, depending), and b) just as I have learned the hard way that you do NOT want to advertise to your employers that you know HTML or web design, you do not want to advertise in mixed company that you are an interpreter.  Suddenly anything else you could contribute or learn is subordinated to that useful role.  Unless I'm getting paid, or I care about the information or people involved in the interpreting that is needed, I don't want to be interpreting. 

This last Russian-American business conference I went to, I was surprised that I just didn't talk very much.  I was downright reticent.  I was skeptical of being a person speaking English or Russian, and therefore assumed an ally of one side or the other.  English-speaking people who don't know Russian are distrustful of you if you are too "native" in your Russian knowledge.  Russians are too imposing and assumptive if you are too "native."  I generally prefer the latter, and generally prefer to be assumed by non-Russian-speakers to be Russian.  It's just a nice distance to have.  But here, the Russians had come to San Francisco to sell their country's resources.  No mystery there.  The English-speakers, however-- that was a mystery that intrigued me.  After all the horrible betrayals foreign businesses have suffered in Russia, WHY would these people be persisting in investing there?  I kind of liked their mad optimism.  I wanted to win their trust and tell them about how much I love Russia, and why they should not only do business in Russia but do it RIGHT, so that the Russian people and lands are left better than they found them.

What also surprised me was that I was MOST intrigued by the wives, dragged along to live in Russia, in the most culturally backwards and godsforsaken places in Russia, for love of their businessman hubby.

These are women who I don't think ever imagined they'd have to learn Russian to keep up some kind of normalcy to their lives.  They were very grateful for my attention to them, what little time I could give them, and I really did want them to ask questions and let me give them basic language lessons.  They should know that there are things to love about Russia, and that Russian isn't impossible to learn, and that non-native speakers can achieve a high level of fluency.  Otherwise I can't imagine how they could bear their lives attached to these industry guys in these remote, weather-beaten places.

One of them was a vet.  I mean a veterinarian.  I gave her mad props.  I grew up rural, I really really respect vets.  I hope she learns Russian and sets up a practice on Sakhalin.  What a hoot that would be!


My butter dish from Vladivostok: a Gzhel girl and her stripey cat.  I call them Sofia and Tourmaline.