Addressing loved ones in Russian

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Let's start with the words "mom, dad". The words seem to be paired, but their biography is different. If “mama” in addressing the mother is an old, native Russian word, then the word “papa” came into our speech much later. What did our distant ancestors call the father?

Since ancient times, the appeal was like this: TyATYa, TyATENKA. How not to remember here Pushkin's lines:

“Children ran into the hut, The father's name is in a hurry:

Tyatya, tyatya, our nets

They brought a dead man!"

Try to replace the word "tyatya" with the word "daddy" here - nothing will work, it will sound artificial, fake. The village children did not know any "dad", only "daddy". “Pope” was borrowed from the French “papa” by the nobles, then merchants and philistines began to say “papa”, and only by the beginning of our century this word spread to all strata of the population - and then not immediately. Mom, too, spread not without the influence of the French "maman" and the German "Mama", but it sounded earlier, there was a coincidence. The part of the mother was also called MOTHER, the father - BATEY, FATHER. In a diminutive form now they say "daddy, mommy", in the last century there were the words "daddy, mommy, daddy, mommy", now dead or dying.

In Gorky's story "Obsession," an old merchant is outraged when he hears from his daughters "daddy, mommy" (this is happening in the 1890s): "And these words are some kind of ugly, non-Russian, in the old days you didn’t hear such words." And Matvey Kozhemyakin in Gorky's novel “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin” is surprised that the boy Borya says not “daddy”, but “daddy”: “Our kids call white bread daddy”. And in fact: the children's word "folder" in the meaning of "bread, loaf" is noted in Dahl's dictionary.

On the pages of Russian classical literature, we often come across the words KUZEN, KUZIN - cousins (sometimes second cousins). These words are newcomers from the French language, they were used only in the noble-intellectual environment and were alien and incomprehensible to the people. The Russian classics even sometimes wrote both words in French, in Latin, or in the French way: in Goncharov's "Cliff" we read "cousin" instead of cousin. Tatyana's mother Larina comes to Moscow to visit her cousin Polina (probably altered by Praskovya), Tatyana's aunt. "What an esharp cousin gave me!" - says one of the princesses in "Woe from Wit" (the French word "esharp" soon became Russified and turned into a familiar scarf). Princess Zina in L. Tolstoy's story "Khodynka" goes to a festivities with her cousin Alexei.

The words "cousin", "cousin" are not completely forgotten, but today they sound pretentious, old-fashioned. The people never accepted them, and nowadays they are almost out of use.

When reading old Russian literature, we must also bear in mind that the word "MOMKA" did not mean mother in a dismissive form, but a nurse, then a teacher (mother of Princess Xenia in Pushkin's "Boris Godunov"), and BATYUSHKOY was called not only his own father, but and the priest, MOTHER - the priest's wife. The peasants often referred to the master and the lady as father and mother.