Languagle #13: Russian
Без труда не вынешь и рыбку из пруда
Bez truda ne vynesh i rybku iz pruda
"Without effort you won't even pull a fish out of the pond."
What it means
Nothing comes without effort, even something as small as a fish from a pond. The two halves rhyme in Russian (truda, pruda), and it is probably the best-known Russian proverb about hard work.
How to say it
byis troo-DAH nyi VIH-nyish ee RIHP-koo ees proo-DAH
The ih in VIH and RIHP is the Russian letter ы, a sound English doesn't have: say ee while pulling your tongue back. Unstressed vowels in Russian get short and weak, which is why не sounds like nyi.
Word by word
- Без byis: without
- труда troo-DAH: work, effort (from труд, trud)
- не вынешь nyi VIH-nyish: you won't pull out
- и ee: even (it usually means 'and')
- рыбку RIHP-koo: a little fish (from рыбка, a small, fond form of рыба, fish)
- из пруда ees proo-DAH: out of the pond (from пруд, prud)
Труда and пруда rhyme.
Where it was found
Written down in Vladimir Dahl's Proverbs of the Russian People (Пословицы русского народа), published in 1862. Dahl gathered more than 30,000 sayings, and the book is still the standard collection of Russian folk proverbs.
Similar sayings
- Slovak: Bez práce nie sú koláče. Without work there are no cakes. (Languagle #11)
- English: No pain, no gain
How to recognise Russian
Russian is one of many languages written in Cyrillic, so the alphabet alone won't settle it. Russian uses ы, э and the hard sign ъ, and now and then ё. What it doesn't have matters just as much. Ukrainian swaps in і, ї and є and has no ы or э. Belarusian has ы too, but also ў and і, which Russian never uses. Bulgarian has no ы or э and uses ъ as an everyday vowel, as in България. Serbian and Macedonian use ј, љ and њ. Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Mongolian add letters like ө, ү and ң. Cyrillic with ы and none of those extras is very likely Russian.
About the Russian language
Russian is an East Slavic language and the most widely spoken native language in Europe, with around 150 million native speakers and over 250 million speakers in total. It is official in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and widely used across the former Soviet Union. It is written in Cyrillic, an alphabet developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th and 10th centuries and named after Saint Cyril.
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