Structural differences between Russian and English - how sentence formation affects tone and meaning

Alternate title: why (I think) Russian as a language is structurally suited to different emotional connotations than is English.

Russian is a notoriously difficult language for English-first learners. That can be attributed to a different alphabet, gendered nouns and verb endings, declination of verbs, and a whole host of other features English just doesn’t have. I think the thing that sets Russian apart in terms of emotional capacity, though, is the lack of rigid sentence structure. I want to talk about vocabulary and verb tense and how English is great as a learned language too, at some point, but starting with sentence structure seems most appropriate because it affects everything else on a very basic level.

When constructing a sentence, English has rigid rules. Words need to be in a particular order - if not words particular in order were, the sentence gets unreadable rather quickly. Russian doesn’t really have that same rigidity - words flow just as smoothly in a different order, and the ‘sense’ comes from the way the words themselves are structured. A verb can have an ending that signifies to whom it belongs, like in English, but certain uses of nouns and adjectives also take distinct endings based on context.

However, the interesting part of it for me is that the sense isn’t transferred from the sentence level to the word level, there’s essentially just added sense. The arrangement of the words within the sentence in Russian isn’t rigid, but it is important (I would argue even more emotionally important than in English), so you have these two flavors of sense coming from the sentence arrangement and from the word choice. English has this to some extent, where rearranging the component fragments of a sentence affects the meaning of the sentence - “to the park we will go!” has a wildly different connotation than “we will go to the park!” even though grammatically they’re both correct (to the best of my knowledge).

I’d argue, though, that this contrast in English is too wild. Russian sentences can carry very subtle connotation shifts from the reversal of two words in a sentence in a way that English is simply not structured to accept. If you say in Russian “I’ll be here” you can arrange the words as ‘I’ll be here’ or ‘I’ll here be’. In the first variation you’re just stating a simple fact. Your mother said she was going to pick out a book at the library and you’re saying you’ll be waiting - the emphasis is on the ‘be’ part. In the second variation, you’re implicitly highlighting the ‘here’ - your mother’s going to the library, but you? You’ll be here, you don’t want to go to the library. It’s a really subtle tone shift in a way that English has only in its spoken form.

There’s a whole separate conversation to be had about how sentence structure rigidity in English helps language learners acquire the language and how because of that spoken English more than spoken Russian (but perhaps less than spoken French) assumes a context of understanding and base experience that may not be applicable to all of the participants of the conversation, but that’s not what this is about. In your conversation with your mother about the library (“I’ll be here”), the closest written English equivalent to the tonal shift in the written Russian would be “here, I will be,” which is an absurd sentence that requires the speaker to be wearing a Victorian blouse and staring forlornly out of a window onto the cold February rain. Written Russian is fundamentally able to carry more context and more connotation than written English, and while I’m sure that makes it infuriating as a learned language it also allows for so much room to express emotion and nuance and that’s just so, so cool to me.

Which is not to say that English is a cold, lifeless language with no emotion or connotation. One of the interesting things in English that works in this nuanced-sense way is the addition of filler words. “I had cereal and then watched TV and pet my cat” has a different emotional arc than “I had cereal and then I watched TV and then I pet my cat,” which in turn is different to “I had cereal, watched TV, and pet my cat.” At the base level, the sentences convey the same information, but in the first one you’re describing your day to a friend at school, in the second you’re listing the actions you took to a police detective to establish an alibi, and in the third you’re demonstrating that you had a pretty chill Saturday. Of course, a lot of that depends on verbal tone, and speech patterns are different for everyone, but in written English you get that same sort of effect as you do with intra-sentence rearranging in Russian. The thing is that that trick works in Russian, too.

The behavior I want to explore further later is punctuation as a form of verbalising written English - when you write a sentence that should maybe have some punctuation but doesn’t really and so you speak it in a certain way in your head that might carry more tone and nuance than a ‘normal’ sentence. I’ve found myself using this type of punctuation-inflection more and more recently, and I think it might tie into what I touched on earlier with the assumption of a shared social and linguistic history when using English. It’s interesting to me in particular the ways in which those speech patterns and irregular writing patterns shift when presented with different audiences.

But really, genuinely, that’s not what this is about and I’m going to stop talking about it for the time being. My point in this discussion is that the way sentence structure is lenient in Russian precludes a lot of learners from taking all of the layered meaning from a given sentence, but it also allows for a much greater range of emotional expression in a smaller space, something which doesn’t happen on the same scale in written English.

On the Naming of the Horror in Little Shop of Horrors

Herein presented: a lukewarm take on the symbolism of naming the monster in Little Shop of Horrors “Audrey II.”

A brief recap of the musical is perhaps in order. Seymour works in a flower shop, has a crush on Audrey, Audrey is in an abusive relationship, Seymour discovers a strange plant after a random eclipse, names it Audrey II, the plant craves human blood, Seymour starts killing people to feed it, gets super famous, decides that killing people isn’t worth it, the plant eats person-Audrey, Seymour sacrifices himself to kill the plant. Naming the plant Audrey II is presented as “I’m in love with Audrey-the-person so I’m going to name this awesome new plant after her,” but whatever the actual reasons for it from either Seymour’s perspective or that of the writers, the symbolic implications are fascinating.

Broadly, Audrey II is a man-eating plant that has no morally-good rationale for making Seymour kill people. Sure, it tells Seymour to kill ‘bad people’ because the world has enough of those, but there is very little if any subtext in the musical that the plant wants to rid the world of only ‘bad people’. In fact, the Finale Ultimo says the plant goes on to “eat Cleveland, and Des Moines … and this theatre” [in some recordings, “and where you live”], so the ‘bad people’ thing was only a means of starting the killing spiral.

This presents the logical conclusion that since Audrey II wants to kill people willy-nilly for no reasoned end besides controlling the world, and Audrey II is named after Audrey-the-person, Audrey-the-person necessarily either shares those basic values or (for juxtaposition/foil reasons) has the opposite of those values.

First, the second. The Audreys are at best weak foils, as foils imply opposing parallels in action and/or intention. In action, Audrey II kills people without remorse and with ill intent; Audrey-the-person is responsible for death, but is passive in her killing. Yes, the Dentist and Seymour die because of Audrey-the-person, but not because of her intentions or actions but expressly because of these men’s desire to ‘have’ or ‘save’ her. Audrey-the-person does not express a desire for the Dentist to die - she is the victim of abuse and his death releases her from that, but she herself does not expressly motivate the killing. She doesn’t tell Seymour “gee, it sure would be nice if someone - hint, hint - killed my boyfriend,” Seymour looks at her situation and goes “yeah, I could probably kill that guy and things would be better for Audrey.” Then Seymour’s death, as well, is not intentional on her part. It is a reaction to the plant’s having hurt Audrey.

So when Audrey-the-person has no agency in the killings that are done around her I’m not certain that calling the Audreys foils is relevant. It is interesting to consider them as killings done on her behalf, and therefore as a commentary on how Seymour’s perceptions of Audrey-the-person’s needs motivate killings in the same way as do Audrey-the-plant’s intentional calls-to-killing. Murdering the Dentist is seen as at least equally rational as a reaction to his abuse of Audrey-the-person as it is as a reaction to the plant’s motivation. “She projected an aura of needing help, which was the same as actively asking me to murder him.” I would imagine (and hope) that it was not the explicit intention of the author to put forth that sort of idea, that it is purely coincidental. And if you don’t delve that deep, the foil argument isn’t that strong.

Then the naming decision paints the Audreys as sharing basic values. At the most innocent end of the spectrum, this is a simple coincidence, the name is meant only as a reflection of Seymour’s attraction to Audrey, I should stop overanalysing things, everything’s okay. But I think that it bears talking about, how naming the monster after the person necessarily invites comparisons of their desires. Audrey-the-person is compared to an entity that is maliciously working toward the killing off of people in general, even without portraying either as the immediate culprit of these deaths (see: the Dentist’s death as a result of his abuse of Audrey, and from Seymour’s desire to do away with him, so it’s not either Audrey’s fault, but the impetus for his death comes from the convergence of the two Audreys). What is the point, then? That women want to cause chaos and destruction, and prey on emotional vulnerability and desire to help just to achieve their horrible, gruesome ends? When Audrey II gives Seymour an excuse to kill the Dentist, it is effectively mirroring how Audrey-the-person is also giving Seymour an ‘excuse’ to kill him. Yes, it could just as well be a commentary on how Seymour’s killing the Dentist over the ‘excuse’ of this abuse is morally wrong and the situation of helplessness or pain isn’t tantamount to an incitement to violence, but at the same time the plant is named after her. These are implications that have to matter because the connotation of sharing a name is so strong, such a trope, so important to so many stories. Is it oversight? Is it commentary?

This lukewarm take comes without touching on Audrey II’s consumption of Audrey-the-person, as that is another large can of worms, nor is there commentary here about the possible ingrained sexism of the ‘I killed someone for her, but she was in pain so essentially she made me do it’ reading. I just genuinely found it interesting.

Hyperawareness of puns in a second language

I was thinking recently about how the acquisition of a second language seems to (at least anecdotally) lead to a more acute ability to detect puns.

It is my belief that this phenomenon comes from the separation between words and concepts in a second language. In a native language, the concepts are so ingrained within the words themselves that there is no separation between the word and its meaning. But even in second languages acquired very early on, languages in which a person is incredibly fluent, there is a small layer of disambiguation that comes from learning the second language as essentially a set of translation words for the concepts in a native language.

Less abstractly: an infant learns the word “ball” in their native language(s) as the word for the concept of the thing that is the ball. They are introduced to the object, then the word “ball” is repeated until the child learns to recognise the word as being a set of sounds by which the idea of the ball-object is related from person to person. If that child is introduced to a second language after they have made this connection, the second language’s word for “ball” is connected to the native-language word for “ball” and not the intrinsic concept of the ball itself. This very slight disconnect leads to what I think is an imperceptible, split-second decision whenever a homophone is introduced in the second language, even far later in life, where the possibly ambiguous word is highlighted in that person’s mind and split into all of the possible concept-meanings, then the applicable concept-meaning is chosen and placed within the context.

In this way, the second-language learner reflexively considers all of the possible meanings of a given word as a step in processing that word, where for a lot of simpler concepts a truly native speaker might have such a deep word-concept tie that they would not experience that step. This naturally leads to a higher sensitivity to wordplay in a second language, particularly puns.

But I would be willing to believe that development of second language skills might increase this ability to detect puns even in a first language, if not to the same extent. I suppose it might depend on the degree to which the native speaker is aware of their second language, or the situation in which the speaker finds themselves (for example in terms of the ratio of native to non-native speakers in the conversation).

I’m interested in the extent to which the age of acquisition, length of acquisition, and number of languages (especially in different language groups/families) affect this phenomenon, as well as whether it extends to syntactical wordplay or just puns and single-word-based wordplay. If you have any thoughts on this, or any related personal experiences, please don’t hesitate to share.