Russian Language - anyone fluent?
Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 2:10 pm
I'm not, but my name is Russian enough (and I guess I look Eastern European enough) that people often expect me to be. Yesterday I was walking past my office at school, which I haven't used in months in favor of working in my lab, and noticed this note written on the whiteboard on my door (the drawings are not part of the message - I know who drew them):
This is weird because anyone who knows me well enough to write mysterious Russian messages to me on my whiteboard knows that despite my background I don't actually know the language. I can think of one person I know in the area who probably knows Russian, knows I don't know Russian, and could guess that I enjoy linguistic puzzles enough to be intrigued by Cyrillic script on my whiteboard, but they've never been to my office and have no reason to know where it is. I guess they could have just gone to my department and wandered around til they found it??
It's possible the message is not meant for me - I share the room with one other girl. However, she has been to the room all of twice in the years I've been attending the school, whereas I've held office hours there and worked in there and had friends visit me there and such. So if the writer was targeting someone they had seen using the room, they probably saw me. If someone was writing to one of us in our presumed native languages based purely on the ethnicity of our names, I'm the more likely candidate, since I have a Russian name while hers is Korean. It's also possible that the message was to someone not in my office at all - it's on the outside of my door after all, and in a fairly public hallway where anyone might read it (or write on it). But there's only one set of handwriting, so it's not like two people were having a conversation on my board. And honestly the hall is generally pretty deserted, so it's unlikely anyone would have been loitering (unless they were waiting for someone else's office hours) or have any reason to expect someone to walk past and see the note.
So unless someone had Russian homework and felt like comparing the effect of prepositions on the dative case, using affectionate verbs and "тебе" as the object, on my whiteboard in my generally-empty third-floor hallway, which seems extremely unlikely, I figure this was written as a note for me. And given the general paucity of Russian-speakers in my local social network, it was probably written to me by someone who I don't know.
I want to write back with something that translates to "i just got your message. who are you? when did you write this?" but all I know how to say of that is "кто ты?"
If there are any Russian speakers on this board who would be interested in helping with this I would be very grateful! To anyone who is not a Russian speaker I hope my recounting of the situation was at least somewhat entertaining.
Update: A friend of a friend, who knows Russian, tells me that the note translates to "i yearn for you, i think about you", which is um. even more 'secret admirer' ish than what I thought?? ._.
Update 2: Wikipedia says that Russian is free word order in intransitive clauses, but (typically) SVO in transitive clauses like the ones in my note, so the fact that the lines in the note are SVO doesn't indicate a nonnative speaker like I first thought.
My Russian is practically nonexistant, but I think that means "I want to see you/ I think about you", possibly with slightly weird word order? One of the few things I learned how to say is "я тебя люблю" so I could tell my grandma I loved her, and that uses SOV word order while the note I got is in SVO like English, which suggests to me it's a native English speaker writing in Russian? But IIRC Russian word order isn't fixed because they use verb cases, so it might not indicate anything. And the д was written more like a Δ, which someone just copying down the output of Google translate probably wouldn't have known to do. Also, I just checked and Google translate does not give "я хочу к тебе" for "i want to see you" or any similar phrasing I can think of, so it probably IS someone who actually knows Russian? Or at least someone who knows someone who knows Russian.я хочу к тебе
я думаю о тебе
This is weird because anyone who knows me well enough to write mysterious Russian messages to me on my whiteboard knows that despite my background I don't actually know the language. I can think of one person I know in the area who probably knows Russian, knows I don't know Russian, and could guess that I enjoy linguistic puzzles enough to be intrigued by Cyrillic script on my whiteboard, but they've never been to my office and have no reason to know where it is. I guess they could have just gone to my department and wandered around til they found it??
It's possible the message is not meant for me - I share the room with one other girl. However, she has been to the room all of twice in the years I've been attending the school, whereas I've held office hours there and worked in there and had friends visit me there and such. So if the writer was targeting someone they had seen using the room, they probably saw me. If someone was writing to one of us in our presumed native languages based purely on the ethnicity of our names, I'm the more likely candidate, since I have a Russian name while hers is Korean. It's also possible that the message was to someone not in my office at all - it's on the outside of my door after all, and in a fairly public hallway where anyone might read it (or write on it). But there's only one set of handwriting, so it's not like two people were having a conversation on my board. And honestly the hall is generally pretty deserted, so it's unlikely anyone would have been loitering (unless they were waiting for someone else's office hours) or have any reason to expect someone to walk past and see the note.
So unless someone had Russian homework and felt like comparing the effect of prepositions on the dative case, using affectionate verbs and "тебе" as the object, on my whiteboard in my generally-empty third-floor hallway, which seems extremely unlikely, I figure this was written as a note for me. And given the general paucity of Russian-speakers in my local social network, it was probably written to me by someone who I don't know.
I want to write back with something that translates to "i just got your message. who are you? when did you write this?" but all I know how to say of that is "кто ты?"
If there are any Russian speakers on this board who would be interested in helping with this I would be very grateful! To anyone who is not a Russian speaker I hope my recounting of the situation was at least somewhat entertaining.
Update: A friend of a friend, who knows Russian, tells me that the note translates to "i yearn for you, i think about you", which is um. even more 'secret admirer' ish than what I thought?? ._.
Update 2: Wikipedia says that Russian is free word order in intransitive clauses, but (typically) SVO in transitive clauses like the ones in my note, so the fact that the lines in the note are SVO doesn't indicate a nonnative speaker like I first thought.