Chernoe kofe i jogUrt, pozhaluista!

[Alina Israeli]

Russian language purist periodically take one word and make it into an 
anti-corruption banner, because they say language is getting corrupted. 
(I periodically wonder how Romans should have deplored the disastrous 
vulgarisation of their language.) As a result that particular word 
exhibits decades if not centuries of fluctuation, unlike other similar 
words. In the beginning of the 19th century such a word was "zvOnit". If 
they had left it alone, the stress would have moved from the ending onto 
the stem by the end of the 19th century and only historians of the 
language might have heard about it.

Similarly the gender of the word "kofe" is a perennial stumbling block. 
 From kifij to foreign looking kofe, but still preserving kofeëk. What 
harm would there be if it had a morphologically predictable gender?

It's not like no other noun has ever changed gender, or adjusted its 
gender. One of my fairly (5-7 years ago) recent discovery is the word 
"kanifol'" ('rosin'), not a terribly popular word, so who cares: it was 
masculine, now it's feminine. There are plenty of other examples of 
various morphological changes, for example "sanatorija" is no longer in 
use, only "sanatorij". Rojal' was feminine, now it's masculine.

Stresses move around in Russian even in native words, but in borrowings, 
there should be no surprises that it adjusts either closer to the 
original or more convenient for the Russian system. Péru became Perú, 
Bostón became Bóston in my life time. And again such examples are 
plentiful.

As a linguist I understand the trend, but as a person I deplore the use 
of tvórog, why is no one mentioning it?  Somehow it's not on anyone's 
radar screen, unlike kofe. Igor' Efimov published a very funny short 
story about tvorog with stresses, but everywhere on tvórog. Would I ever 
use that story in class? Of course not, it goes against my grain. But 
obviously for a lot of people it's the norm. And the generation of my 
grand-children wouldn't even know that there was an issue.


Alina Israeli

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