the Common Place

Language Log’s Barbara Partee writes about a new kind of Internet slang born from switching back and forth between international character sets when keyboarding:

I have a Live Journal account where my “friends” are mainly young Russian linguists, so most of the posts are in Russian, in the Cyrillic alphabet, but user-names, tags, etc., are all in the Roman alphabet. There was one tag that I had often seen in one particular user’s posts, “lytdybr”, and I had just guessed that it was some private code word of her own (I even invented a romantic etymology for it as an abbreviation starting with “love you”.) But then last week I suddenly saw the same tag on a post by another young Russian linguist, and realized that it wasn’t just one person’s private tag.

So I googled it and discovered what it really is: it’s how the Russian word дневник, dnevnik ‘diary’, comes out if you’re typing on a QWERTY keyboard with the keystrokes you would use on a Cyrillic keyboard. There’s a Wiktionary entry about it; and I didn’t even know such a category of — of what? I guess I’ll call it slang — existed.

So on my LJ, I asked if there were any other examples, and it generated some interesting discussion. One person told me about usus for гыгы (gygy ‘laughter’ — think hee-hee); someone remarked that the “usus” of usus is fun in itself. Another example is ghbdtn, which is привет, privet ‘hi’ or ‘greetings’, common in instant messaging, with ICQ, Google Talk, etc.

One common example goes in the other direction: Russians typing in Cyrillic often use З.Ы. for P.S. so as not to have to switch out of the Russian keyboard. And one person told me they even sometimes use Ж-) instead of : -) for the same reason!

The phenomenon even has an example in contemporary fiction. In one of Boris Akunin’s detective novels (set in Imperial Russia and featuring the Byronic detective hero Erast Fandorin) there is an English character named Фрейби (freyby). Freyby is what you get if you type Акунин (Akunin) on a QWERTY keyboard.

lytdybr/лытдыбр has also acquired a specific meaning relating to blogging, as Partee explains.

One of my students commented that lytdybr, even sometimes transliterated back to лытдыбр, has become a word of its own, with a meaning more specific than the original ‘diary’.

It is often (but not always, there is a neutral meaning too) used to tag posts in blogs that are nothing more than boring retelling of author’s life. For example, something like “Just eaten some apples. Cool.” is a typical lytdybr in its negative meaning.

I am still working out what sort of posts will go here in my commonplace book - there may even be some reshuffling in the near future. However, I sincerely hope to keep the “lytdybr” type of post (in its negative meaning) to a minimum! Ж-)

It was such a trip to come across Viktor Tsoy in a totally unexpected (for me) place: on 3quarksdaily. Though I guess given the catholic (notice the small c, my atheist friends) tastes of the bunch there I shouldn’t be too surprised.

The piece on 3quarks was an excerpt from this post on the Knackered Hack, which he followed up with a post tying together many threads, including this sleep- and vodka-befogged conversation:

Viktor: Mozhna Teem? (Can I speak to Tim?)

Knackered Hack: [sleepily] Da, eta Teem. (Yes, this is Tim)

Viktor: Teem, eta Viktor. Kak dela? (Tim, it’s Viktor. How are things?)

Knackered Hack: [In a moaning, evidently nauseous voice] Neechevo (So-so)

Viktor: Teem, u tebya seegareta? (Tim, do you have a cigarette?)

Knackered Hack: Nyet (No)

Viktor: Teem, ya ‘khochu seegareta. (Tim, I want a cigarette.)

Knackered Hack: Ya tozhe … Do sveedanye. (Me too … Goodbye.)

If this is true then it represents one of the more fluent conversations I ever had in Russian. So it’s sad that I wasn’t there to recall it. In vodka veritas, clearly.

Now, it’s been years since I’ve been around Russian speakers, except occasionally in my UCSC Extension classes, and those encounters typically do not involve the consumption of vodka and black bread. But since encountering KH’s post, I’ve discovered that Tsoy is very much alive on the internets, especially youtube. The sound quality is pretty uneven, but just hearing that much Russian has been like opening a window in my brain. I’ve been thinking about stuff I haven’t thought of in years, and finding I remember more Russian than I thought.

In particular I’ve been reminded of how Russian can be both extremely laconic and very musical at the same time. Take the opening line of “Posledniy Geroy” (Last Hero): “Noch’ korotka, tsel’ daleka” (”the night is short and the goal is far away”). I know, it’s not Pushkin, it’s only rock and roll, but I like it.

I wonder if anyone has done research about how language interacts with memory formation. This experience, of having a window open in my brain, reminds of when my grandmother’s wits were beginning to wander a bit, and I happened to say something to her in German. She answered in German and we had a mostly coherent conversation, but from then on, her language setting was stuck on German. This was very inconvenient for the rest of my family. (After a nap, she was able to speak English again.)

What is interesting was that High German was a second language for both my Grandma and me. High German was the language of church and (daily) Bible-reading in Mt. Lake, Minnesota, in the early 20th century. Mennonite Plautdietsch was the everyday language of family interaction. My dad grew up speaking neither because grandma was Moravian and spoke whatever it is that Moravians speak, and also because Grandpa was very modern (for a Mennonite) and wanted his kids to speak good English and not be labelled “dumb Russians.” Russian, not German, because they came from Mennonite colonies in the Crimea. Did my choice of foreign languages have something to do with ancestral memories? I have no clue, they just seemed like interesting choices at the time.

[I also posted on Viktor Tsoy and magnitizdat’ culture on Dangerous Intersection. KH promises that he will be posting more on Tsoy including personal photos and recordings from the time he spent hanging out with Kino in the mid-’80’s, so stay tuned. ]