IlyaShpitser comments on Rationality Quotes November 2014 - Less Wrong
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Oh yes, there are. My personal pet peeve, there is no way to distinguish "difficulty" and "complexity" in Russian. There is even no simple way (or, at least, I don't know one) like "difficult as in how hard it is to do, not as in how hard it is to describe"). However, hard way (spending a minute explaining the difference and then using some shorthand) works perfectly with Russian-only speakers, even not very intelligent ones. They do seem to have that distinction in their maps, and sometimes even comment on how weird it is that it is impossible to spell it properly. I never saw anyone being confused by it.
BTW, Russian does have that distinction. Question words is one area in which Russian is superior, in my opinion.
Oh, that reminds me. In Russian, every noun has a grammatical gender. Cabinet is male, keyboard is female and window is neuter. It DOES carry a lot of connotations that affect me in introspectively noticable ways.
Curious note: when rereading this post last time before posting, I noticed that in the very first paragraph, when I talked about distinction between complexity and difficulty, I used words "simple" and "hard" as literal antonyms without even noticing.
Is there a russian word for "fun?"
Веселье. It's a bit closer to "joy" or "merry-ness", though. Why?
Lots of other words seem to be used in similar contexts, e.g. 'prikol,' 'klyevo', maybe even 'pizdyetz' (some may be archaic, it's been a while since I had been immersed in Russian), but none of them seem to be exactly right. I think it's weird that there is no exact isomorphism from such a basic English concept.
Nobody uses the word Веселье in colloquial Russian in this sense, but people use "fun" in colloquial English all the time.
I came to realise, that I use the word 'fun' in its original English pronounciation (фан) quite a lot in Russian speech, as do my peers. It seems that we have just adopted it.
That's interesting, thank you. Russian has adapted a lot of English vocabulary in the internet age.
There is actually a bit of sneaky cultural warfare in this. After all, it's not just language that is being adopted. Language is just the audible tip of a cultural iceberg.
I think that "прикол" is closer to "amusing" than to "fun". "клёво" is more like "cool". And I always thought that "пиздец" was universally bad, something akin to "game over, man ! game over !" -- but words do change over time...
I have seen the word пиздец used after surviving a near miss, or witnessing a particularly daring and successful stunt (?as an exclamation of relief?). As I said, none of them are exactly right.
In Russia, state has fun with you.