Russification

[igenlode]

I am amused by observing the process of Russification of gamer slang in Project Zomboid: having adopted English terms the language proceeds to add all the relevant suffixes etc to them as if they were ancient Slavonic monosyllabic roots, until you end up with something that is almost totally divorced from any Englishness at all and nicely assimilated into the language :-D

So to 'loot', for example, takes on a verb ending to become the Russian verb лутать, and then acquires a corresponding perfective verb form полутать so that it can form a future tense, and you end up with reflexive expressions like полутаемся немножко -- "Let's go and do some looting" -- in which the original basic syllable 'loot' has become almost entirely buried in Russian accretions!

Even more assimilated is the verb to 'check', which has been adopted as чекать and then apparently acquired a thoroughly Russian irregular perfective form, чекнуть, presumably by analogy with such verb pairs as прыгать/прыгнуть...

Comments

[paserbyp]

«чекать» - in Ukrainian is waiting and «лутать» in Russian «грабить» and in Ukrainian «грабувати».

[igenlode]

I'm not surprise that most languages would have an existing word for such an ancient part of warrior life :-)
But presumably in gamer slang it's fashionable to use bits of English vocabulary...

(It took me some while to work out from context the modern Internet connotations of ссылка, which in my 1990s dictionary is defined as political exile; it makes sense, I suppose, that it is something that 'sends you away' from the current Web page!)

One thing that interests me about the 1930s book of Russian for Learners exercises that I have acquired is that it consistently shows the feminine instrumental endings as -ою/-ею, which by the 1990s is shown as something only found in poetry; apparently in the 1930s it was still alive and well. Although the same book also uses 'thou' to translate the second-person singular in English, which was definitely no longer in use even in poetry in England in the 1930s -- I can see why they've done it, because the distinction between singular and plural is otherwise impossible to make, but you would have got some very strange looks if you addressed anyone as 'thou' in practice!

(I also found myself questioning whether a 1930s waiter would be likely to address a hotel guest as Сударь -- they certainly don't in the 1970s material I've been watching -- but the book does in fact have a footnote clarifying that this is pre-Revolutionary usage...)

[paserbyp]

Indeed it’s pre-1917 usage!