A Word About Words

2 ideas

1. The glokaya kuzdra nonsense sentence

   Uspensky retells linguist Lev Shcherba's invented sentence 'Glokaya kuzdra shteko budlanula bokra i kudryachit bokryonka'. Every root in it is meaningless, yet any Russian speaker can tell that some female creature did something sharp or sudden, once, to a male creature and is now doing something ongoing to its young. Endings, suffixes and word order alone carry a large share of a sentence's meaning, independent of vocabulary.

2. Folk etymology reshapes foreign words

   When speakers meet an opaque borrowed word, they unconsciously remodel it to resemble familiar native words. In popular Russian, 'mikroskop' became 'melkoskop' (from melky, 'tiny'), and 'bulvar' became 'gulvar' (from gulyat, 'to stroll'). The drive to make words make sense can override their actual history, and some of these reshapings stick.

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