What do you know about the Russian language?

Do you guys know any interesting, surprising or simply informative facts about the Russian language? For instance, I’ve heard that Russian ranked as the second-most used language on the Internet after English some years ago. Would be fun to read your facts too :) Please share in the comments.

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ambrose | 0 points - about 4 years ago

Interesting thing about Latin borrowings: endings. Gaius Julius Caesar is Гай Юлий Цезарь in Russian, not Гайус Юлиус, because ‘us’ is a Latin ending for masculine nouns in nominative case and the corresponding ending in Russian would be an absence of one. Virus is вирус, however, not вир, so it’s not always the case. Anyway, it works for every personal Latin name.


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otto | 1 point - about 4 years ago

The difference between water (вода) and vodka is only one letter :)

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madeleine | 0 points - about 4 years ago

What surprised me is the fact that you can make adjectives with basically anything!!! 

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elvira | 0 points - about 4 years ago

It's actually similar in German. There are a lot of very common German words that are actually calques from Latin (especially philosophical terms)


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german | 0 points - about 4 years ago

There is a lot of French loanwords in Russian, it's quite big even though most of the words aren't that commonly used nowadays, they're often related to art, luxury, law and so on.

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