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Безэквивалентые слова

Это из моей любимой русской книги грамматики "Using Russian". I think it can be helpful to both learners of Russian and learners of English.





Азартный: adventurous, animated, passionate; describes sb who gets carried away with sth or is prepared to stake a lot on sth, e.g. азартный человек = gambler (fig); also азартные игры: games of chance, gambling.

Бездорожье: absence of roads; bad condition of roads; season when roads are impassable.

Белоручка: lit “person with white hands,” i.e. sb who shirks rough or dirty work; softie

Будни: lit weekdays, working days; fig humdrum life, colourless existence, the everyday; antonym of праздники.

Быт: way of life; everyday life; daily routine, habitual pattern of life; drudgery. The word (which is derived from the verb быть) evokes the material world and a static conservative form of existence.

Воля: freedom, liberty, free will. The word implies lack of constraint, natural freedom, even a state close to anarchy.

Выступать/выступить: to make some public statement or appearance, e.g. выступить в парламенте, to speak in Parliament; выступить в печати, to write in the press; выступить с речью, to make a speech.

Гибель: destruction, ruin, wreck, downfall, death (esp tragic, violent death in war or as a result of an accident). English lacks a general noun from the verb to perish (погибать/погибнуть).

Дежурная, дежурный: person on duty, e.g. at the entrance to a block of flats or to a hotel corridor; the word suggests sb who keeps watch.

Деятель: lit sb who does sth, but usually only meaningful in combination with some adjectives.

Душевый: sincere, cordial, heartfelt, having soul.

Закономерный: natural, in the sense of bound to happen; in conformity with some law (i.e. a natural order of things, not necessarily or even primarily a juridical order); normal or regular in one of these senses; cf. законный, legitimate, i.e. in accordance with the criminal or civil law.

Застой: stagnation (fig), i.e. political, economic, intellectual stagnation. The word evokes the climate of the Brezhnev period of the 1970s as Russians perceived it at the time of perestroika in the 1980s.

Земляк/Землячка: fellow countryman, fellow-townsman, fellow-villager; a person from the same district.

Злой: evil, bad, wicked, malicious, vicious, unkind, ill-natured, angry. There is no adjective in English that conveys the full range of meaning of злой, which may be best defined as the antonym of добрый.

Интеллигенция: intelligentsia, professional class(es). The word denotes a group of intellectuals who are politically engaged but at the same time are excluded from power and who feel a sense of moral responsibility for the state of their society.

Командировка: business trip, mission, posting

Крупа: groats; a general word for grain from which kasha can be made.

Крупный: big, large, large-scale, outstanding, important; major, well-known. The adjective imples that all the elements of a thing are large, e.g. крупный рис, long-grain rice; antonym of мелкий.

Лицо: face; person, e.g. гражданское лицо, civilian; дейстующее лицо, character (in play).

Личность: personality, individual

Любоваться/полюбоваться: to enjoy looking at sth. The verb may sometimes be translated by Eng to admire but it implies feasting one’s eyes on sth, including natural beauty.

Мелкий/мещанство/мещанский: small, fine (of rain, sand); also petty bourgeois behavior/attitudes. The words are used in a figurative sense to evoke sb who is narrow-minded, philistine, or such behavior; in Soviet parlance they were used as pejorative terms to describe a selfish mindset.

Мировоззрение: view of the world, set of beliefs. The word implies something more systematic and coherent that English outlook.

Ненаглядный: sth which one cannot take one’s eyes off. The word denotes the quality of an object, admiration of which one might express with the verb любоваться.

Новостройка: newly erected building, building work in a new town or district. The word brings to mind the rapid urban development of the post-war Soviet period.

Обыватель: inhabitant, citizen, the average man, the man in the street; fig philistine in pre-revolutionary days. In Soviet times the word was used as a synonym of мещанин, i.e. a narrow-minded person without social interests; it may now be reverting to its pre-revolutionary role.

Однолюб: sb who has had only one love in her or his life or who can love only one person at a time.

Опохмелиться: to have a drink to cure a hangover, to have a drink the morning after.

Отходчивый: describes sb who loses her/his temper with sb else but does not subsequently harbor resentment towards the person who angered her/him.

Подвиг: heroic deed, feat, act of heroism, sth done for the general good.

Пошлый/пошлость: morally low, tasteless, rude, common, banal, vulgar; an object or act that can be described in this way. No single English word has the same field of meaning although tacky, a recent borrowing from American English, does convey the same notion of lack of good taste.

Праздник: holiday in sense of festival, national holiday, festive occasion, occasion for celebration, red-letter day; antonym of будин.

Проводы/простор: space, spaciousness, expanse, scope, freedom, elbow-room. The word evokes the wide open spaces and seeming infinity of the Russian landscape.

Раздолье: synonymous with простор.

Размах: scope, range, sweep, scale, span, amplitude. When applied to character the word may suggest an expansiveness and generosity that is admired.

Разруха: ruin, collapse, devastation (esp after war, revolution or some other cataclysmic event).

Ровесник/ровесница: person of the same age.

Родной: one’s own (by blood relationship), native, e.g. родной язык, (native language). Antonym of чужой. The word has strong positive connotations.

Самородок/самородный: a person who possesses natural gifts but lacks a systematic, thorough education; (of metals) nugget, piece of mined metal in chemically pure form.

Сверстник/сверстница: synonyms of ровесник/ровесница, respectively.

Свой: one’s own, my/your/his/her/our/their own; close in meaning to родный (and therefore also having positive connotations) and an antonym of чужой.

Сглазить: to put the evil eye (on).

Сплошной: unbroken, continuous, all-round, complete, entire, total

Срок: period of time, term, deadline.

Стройный: well-proportioned, elegant, shapely, well-balanced, harmonious, orderly, well put together. The word evokes sth that is aesthetically pleasing, pleasant to the eye.

Увлекаться/увлечься + instr: to be carried away (by), to become keen (on), to be mad (about), to fall for, to become enamoured (of). The word suggests great enthusiasm.

Успевать/успеть: to have time (to do sth), to manage (in time), to succeed (in doing sth in time).

Хам/хамка/хамство/хамский: lout, boor, cow; loutishness, boorishness; loutish, boorish. Хам denotes a person who behavees in a crude, disgusting way and has no respect for herself/himself or others. (The word is derived from the name of the biblical character Ham, who in Genesis 9 saw his father Noah naked and told his brothers.)

Чужой: sb else’s, other people’s, not mine/ours; foreign, alien, strange. The word is an antonym of родной and свой and therefore has negative connotations.