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:
“A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)