"Ya Niznayu”
The words any student of Russian dreads. In a language class, when confronted with a swirling vortex of chaos unfurling in front of his eyes, a student tries to sort what he comes across. Almost like Dorothy (the girl who met the Wizard of Oz), the student tries to group a cow and a table together. “They both have four legs after all” he reasons. Sometimes, even under such broad parameters, a few (read, a lot many) things don’t fall under any grouping. It is then, that he questions his teacher. The question is a single word. “Why”, a word teachers love hearing because it gives them the opportunity to say,
“Ya Niznayu”
Before you, my dear reader, decides to skip this post because you don’t understand the abovementioned phrase, let me tell you, “Ya Nizhnayu” means “I don’t know”. When your teacher tells you that she doesn’t know why something is the way it is, boss, you’re in big trouble. Upon further prodding by a determined student, which I would like you to believe I was, she would go into a solemn silence. You know, like when Google does when you put in too many keywords and the server doesn’t know which one of the keywords is, to borrow a journalistic phrase, truly “key”. But then, the awkward silence would be followed by something even more dreadful.
“It is tradition.”
When you’re learning something, you don’t want to be told that you should or should not do something because it’s tradition. Even if it’s told to you in a Russian accent. For instance, how would it have been if someone had told young Galileo Galilee that it was not tradition to throw heavy objects from the top of a tower that is already leaning? Or to Einstein that it’s tradition to have the presentation of breakthrough science preceded by a haircut? You get the point.
A language that has six cases, each of which is more confusing than the previous one, and three genders (including for objects like house and door), which are determined not by any scientific principle of gender determination, but by seeing if the word ends in a consonant or a vowel, and three ways of indicating singular and plural, if you add to this, the “Chemical X” of tradition, you get the linguistic equivalent of an extremely tantrumatic Uranium 235 nucleus, that upon gentle prodding by a “Ya Niznayu” sets off a chain reaction, leading to chaos, confusion and the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear catastrophe.
The Russian language has a copious vocabulary that is constantly enriched, in a way not too different from how the memory cards of our phones have multiple copies of the same photo because we forwarded it to multiple recipients. Yes, not only are there several words to say something, each word is also conjugated and declinated based on the case, number and gender, thus giving birth to a vast universe with constantly morphing organisms. In fact, a word in a sentence is like a highly reactive chlorine atom caught in an organic chemistry equation. Its status changes continuously, based on its interaction with other words.
As I write this, I see around me a cluster of personal pronouns that, like a school of amoeba are changing shape faster than I can perceive. The inner optimist in me sees this as an advantage. If the language is spoken fast enough, I assure myself, people will still get what is being told, without being able to point out the flaws in it. Yes, that’s it. Winning strategy, right here. I’m going to use this weekend to find the guy who gave the voice for the memorable “Mutual funds are subject to...” And request him to give me lessons.
See you until then.
