Word Formation
Russian has on hand a set of prefixes, prepositional and adverbial in nature, as well as diminutive, augmentative, and frequentative suffixes and infixes. All of these can be stacked one upon the other, to produce multiple derivatives of a given word. Participles and other inflectional forms may also have a special connotation. For example:
| мысль | "thought" | |
| мыслишка | "a petty, cute or a silly thought" | |
| мыслища | "a thought of fundamental import" | |
| мышление | "thought; abstract thinking, ratiocination" | |
| мыслить | "to think (as to cogitate)" | |
| смысл | "meaning" | |
| осмыслить | "to comprehend; to rationalize" | |
| осмысливать | "to be in the process of comprehending" | |
| переосмыслить | "to reassess" | |
| переосмысливать | "to be in the process of reassessing (something)" | |
| переосмысливаемый | "(something) in the process of being considered in a new light" | |
| бессмыслица | "nonsense" | |
| обессмыслить | "to render meaningless" | |
| бессмысленный | "meaningless" | |
| обессмысленный | "rendered meaningless" | |
| необессмысленный | "not rendered meaningless" |
Russian has also proven friendly to agglutinative compounds. As an extreme case:
| металлоломообеспечение | "provision of scrap iron" | |
| металлоломообеспеченный | "well supplied with scrap iron" |
Purists (as Dmitry Ushakov in the preface to his dictionary) frown on such words. But here is the name of a street in St. Petersburg:
| Каменноостровский проспект | "Stone Island Avenue" |
Some linguists have suggested that Russian agglutination stems from Church Slavonic. In the twentieth century, abbreviated components appeared in the compound:
| управдом | = управляющий домом | "residence manager" |
Read more about this topic: Russian Grammar
Famous quotes containing the words word and/or formation:
“Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praise from your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful—the formation of fixed habits of work.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)