#russian 101

I can hear all of you out there trying to be just like Ilya and earnestly whispering Я тебя люблю (I love you) to your bae or your pillow or your pet right now. But please beware that if you do not say it EXACTLY RIGHT (like Connor, who is apparently a linguistics witch), you may end up saying something completely different.

Я тебя люблю (Ya tye-'bya lyub-'lyu) - I love you

Я тебя убью (Ya tye-'bya u-'byu) - I kill you

Я тебя еблю (Ya tye-'bya yeb-'lyu) - I fuck you (but in a very silly way)

(Technically "I fuck you" would be Я тебя ебу (Ya tye-'bya ye-'bu), but I'm using an example of what one of my friends actually said while trying to say "I love you" and it turned out hilarious and very special.

This has been a PSA.

Question for you that is not at all fic research - if you’re telling someone to stop what they’re doing, let’s just say in a hypothetical safe word situation, would “стой” be the most appropriate word to use? It’s what I got from some cursory googling but my own Russian knowledge is still super basic so I’m not sure whether to trust it.

Thank you!

Happy to be of service, Mac! I'm glad my arcane knowledge is useful to the community hahaha.

You wouldn't say стой unless you wanted someone to actually stand still. If you want someone to stop bothering you, for example, you'd say "перестань!" And if you want to be a little saucy about it, tell them to fuck off - "отъебись!"

Russian was like trying to fit marbles in her mouth and speak around them. Cherry frowned a little as Natasha patiently repeated the word for her.

Cherry did want to learn. Years ago, she'd been fluent in Dutch, it was the primary language used in her house when she was a child. Everyone but her mother spoke it.

After the accident however, Cherry had no one to speak it with. She did her best to keep it alive and had even managed to teach Tony some, but it had been...decades now. She was sadly out of practice and wasn't sure she'd ever pick up her mother tongue with the efficiency she had in her youth.

Natasha had offered to teach Cherry Russian and that was a very exciting prospect. She loved language and had been learning bits and pieces of Mandarin and Nepali through Wong over the years.

That's Polish, right? I knew a Polish Aleksandra/Ola once. Anyway.

In Russian there's a class of diminutives that are basically one or two syllables of the name + "sha": Natalia=>Natasha, Mikhail=>Misha, Pavel=>Pasha, etc. So apparently Aleksandr/a used to work the same, and the more archaic diminutive is "Aleksasha". But that's still a mouthfull, so over time it evolved into just Sasha. I'm not entirely sure of this explanation, but I think I recall reading it somewhere. There's still other forms of Aleksandr/a that are a total mystery to me: Sanya, or Shura. Like. How. Or Ola for that matter. I don't get it either. In Russian Ola, or Olya, is short for Olga, so I got confused when I was introduced to an Aleksandra and then her friends called her Ola.