Alternate title: why (I think) Russian as a language is structurally suited to different emotional connotations than is English.
Russian is a notoriously difficult language for English-first learners. That can be attributed to a different alphabet, gendered nouns and verb endings, declination of verbs, and a whole host of other features English just doesn’t have. I think the thing that sets Russian apart in terms of emotional capacity, though, is the lack of rigid sentence structure. I want to talk about vocabulary and verb tense and how English is great as a learned language too, at some point, but starting with sentence structure seems most appropriate because it affects everything else on a very basic level.
When constructing a sentence, English has rigid rules. Words need to be in a particular order - if not words particular in order were, the sentence gets unreadable rather quickly. Russian doesn’t really have that same rigidity - words flow just as smoothly in a different order, and the ‘sense’ comes from the way the words themselves are structured. A verb can have an ending that signifies to whom it belongs, like in English, but certain uses of nouns and adjectives also take distinct endings based on context.
However, the interesting part of it for me is that the sense isn’t transferred from the sentence level to the word level, there’s essentially just added sense. The arrangement of the words within the sentence in Russian isn’t rigid, but it is important (I would argue even more emotionally important than in English), so you have these two flavors of sense coming from the sentence arrangement and from the word choice. English has this to some extent, where rearranging the component fragments of a sentence affects the meaning of the sentence - “to the park we will go!” has a wildly different connotation than “we will go to the park!” even though grammatically they’re both correct (to the best of my knowledge).
I’d argue, though, that this contrast in English is too wild. Russian sentences can carry very subtle connotation shifts from the reversal of two words in a sentence in a way that English is simply not structured to accept. If you say in Russian “I’ll be here” you can arrange the words as ‘I’ll be here’ or ‘I’ll here be’. In the first variation you’re just stating a simple fact. Your mother said she was going to pick out a book at the library and you’re saying you’ll be waiting - the emphasis is on the ‘be’ part. In the second variation, you’re implicitly highlighting the ‘here’ - your mother’s going to the library, but you? You’ll be here, you don’t want to go to the library. It’s a really subtle tone shift in a way that English has only in its spoken form.
There’s a whole separate conversation to be had about how sentence structure rigidity in English helps language learners acquire the language and how because of that spoken English more than spoken Russian (but perhaps less than spoken French) assumes a context of understanding and base experience that may not be applicable to all of the participants of the conversation, but that’s not what this is about. In your conversation with your mother about the library (“I’ll be here”), the closest written English equivalent to the tonal shift in the written Russian would be “here, I will be,” which is an absurd sentence that requires the speaker to be wearing a Victorian blouse and staring forlornly out of a window onto the cold February rain. Written Russian is fundamentally able to carry more context and more connotation than written English, and while I’m sure that makes it infuriating as a learned language it also allows for so much room to express emotion and nuance and that’s just so, so cool to me.
Which is not to say that English is a cold, lifeless language with no emotion or connotation. One of the interesting things in English that works in this nuanced-sense way is the addition of filler words. “I had cereal and then watched TV and pet my cat” has a different emotional arc than “I had cereal and then I watched TV and then I pet my cat,” which in turn is different to “I had cereal, watched TV, and pet my cat.” At the base level, the sentences convey the same information, but in the first one you’re describing your day to a friend at school, in the second you’re listing the actions you took to a police detective to establish an alibi, and in the third you’re demonstrating that you had a pretty chill Saturday. Of course, a lot of that depends on verbal tone, and speech patterns are different for everyone, but in written English you get that same sort of effect as you do with intra-sentence rearranging in Russian. The thing is that that trick works in Russian, too.
The behavior I want to explore further later is punctuation as a form of verbalising written English - when you write a sentence that should maybe have some punctuation but doesn’t really and so you speak it in a certain way in your head that might carry more tone and nuance than a ‘normal’ sentence. I’ve found myself using this type of punctuation-inflection more and more recently, and I think it might tie into what I touched on earlier with the assumption of a shared social and linguistic history when using English. It’s interesting to me in particular the ways in which those speech patterns and irregular writing patterns shift when presented with different audiences.
But really, genuinely, that’s not what this is about and I’m going to stop talking about it for the time being. My point in this discussion is that the way sentence structure is lenient in Russian precludes a lot of learners from taking all of the layered meaning from a given sentence, but it also allows for a much greater range of emotional expression in a smaller space, something which doesn’t happen on the same scale in written English.
