I once dated a girl of Italian decent, and she described dropping something in the kitchen and saying “fuck” in French (which she spoke). Her grandmother shakes her finger at her and says, “It’s the same word in Italian!”
I guess it’s the word formation in Russian. As I said, the root of all those words is the same, but they are all different parts of speech. Not only that, but there are multiple forms of the same part of speech with the same root. All have different meanings. “Okhuet’”, “raskhuyarit’”, “nakhuyarit’”, “khuynut’”, “prikhuet’”, “raskhuyachit’”, etc are all verbs. All with the same root (as I said, male sexual organ). All have different meanings. There are even more of a variety of nouns.
See, that’s what I mean, ‘word formation in Russian’. For one thing, what Russian does, is what a ton of other Slavic languages do, so there’s nothing special about it that way, but even beyond that, consider ‘fuck’ in English - it can be (part of) a noun (fucktard, fuckface, but you can call someone ‘a stupid fuck’, or ‘a good fuck’), it can be an adjective (fucking) and it can be any number of verbs (fuck off, fuck up, fuck over. You can fuck with someone, and, oh, you can also fuck them). So I don’t really understand why people fall over backwards in amazement when Russian comes up with a verb like raskhuyarivat’, when English can do pretty much exactly the same thing.
As for coming up with an example of another language that can produce an equivalent to the Russian sentence you came up with, I think the reason I can’t is exactly why I don’t feel comfortable making sweeping statements about how special a language is: I only speak a bunch of them. Moreover, as far as speaking languages goes, swearing fluency usually comes last. Hell, I took years of Russian and I can do any number of things ranging from watching a movie to reading Dostoyevskiy to talking about a number of different topics without too much trouble, but swearing? Nuh uh.
That’s why you always hear speakers of X language saying ‘X language is great for swearing’. It’s great for them, because it’s the only language in which they really know how to do it. But it says more about them than it does about the language. And similarly, the fact that I cannot produce a sentence that might be equivalent to the Russian one you came up with (although I think my little expose on ‘fuck’ shows that in English you might come quite a long way) says more about the fact that I just don’t know enough languages than it does about how special Russian is.
In Mandarin Chinese “ci” with a falling tone means fuck (pronounced kind of like “tse”). The old man who ran the little shop in our dining hall was named Ci, with a rising tone. We students didn’t know the difference when we were new to China, though, and for months we called him Lao Ci with the wrong tone, or “Old Fuck.”
We were told the absolute worst thing you could call someone in Chinese was “turtle’s egg.” We puzzled over that for months, and no Chinese person was able to give us a clear explanation of why it is an insult. It just is.
Do Russians still think it’s very insulting to call someone uncultured?
“Nekulturny” is not swearing. It basically means “rude” or “bad-mannered”, not in a one-time faux pas sense, but in a systemic manner.
It’s the same reason why German “Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister” is better that English “head district chimney sweep”. Or German “Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften” while in English it is “legal protection insurance companies”. It is the difference between sublime and mundane.
:rolleyes:
It’s like a monkey thinking he’s special because he has a tail. They’re both just words and one is not somehow better, more refined, or more adequate than the other; you just happen to like one better than the other. But just because German connects words in that way (as do several other languages, again there’s nothing special here) and English does not does not make it a ‘form of art’. As far as your earlier claim that in Russian, swearing is a form of art because,
I have to disagree here too. Do you honestly think other languages don’t differentiate between shades of meaning? Or that in other languages you don’t have to know declinations and conjugations? If you think these are unique to Russian then surely it must be an art form, but you certainly cannot believe that this is the case.
:rolleyes: I really don’t know what bee flew up your butt, but no, not all languages are exactly the same, and yes, some things are better in some languages than others. That’s my opinion. YMMV.
I think you are referring to “王八蛋”, “王八” being a type of turtle - Trionychidae - Wikipedia if you go to the Chinese version (中文 under languages), you’ll see 王八 under alternative names. 蛋 in Chinese just means egg. Not sure why this is an insult though. It doesn’t seem that bad, I’ve seen it on TV, where it’s translated as “bastard”.
the dutch swear a lot with diseases,
Kankerhoer!..:cancer hooker
Krijg toch de tering!..:go get Tuberculosis
Es ist mir scheisse egal - I don’t give a shit
Schweinekopf - pig head
Yeah, can’t think of any others, either.
As for Russian, you guys forgot
suka - bitch
A word I learned from one of my Russian rap CDs. And here are two that I actually learned from my textbook - how to insult people.
dura (f) / durak (m) - fool
huligana (f)(?) / huligan (m) - hooligan
I’m thinking maybe that “kanker” isn’t a reference to cancer but to chancres/cankers, the sores which are often associated with syphilis. It makes sense, calling someone a siphilitic whore. Does anybody know whether this could be the case?
Along those same lines, in medieval Iceland if you called a man a “sjorðin” you better be ready to defend yourself. “Sjorðin” meant “one who takes it in the ass” and was considered such a vile word the recipient of the insult was legally allowed to kill the insulter, with impunity (i.e., the family could not sue for compensation).
Nope. It’s definitely the diseases. We also have:
Kankerlijer - sufferer of cancer
Typhuslijer - sufferer of typhus
AIDS-lijer has had some popularity in the 80s
Then we have the less contageous swearwords:
Klootzak - ballsack
Flikker - faggot
Kutwijf - cunt/bitch
I put off posting in this thread because of our weird tendency to use diseases. It has to be said that the word ‘kanker’ has some very hard sounds that make it a very usefull curse word. It’s all about the K’s.
I fucked up that fucking fuckface for fucking around and fucking up.
=
I physically injured that really undesirable person for not doing what he was supposed to be doing and for inadequately performing what he did try to do.
English is creative too with swearing 
And look, no mention of sex or human excretions of any kind.
True but look at that sentence. It’s just repetition of the same word. As I said, the difference between mundane and sublime. But hey - that’s my personal opinion. YMMV.
Well, according to a friend of mine who spent half a year there on work commission, “Switzerland is a shitty country where they speak the world’s ugliest language” so yeah, maybe. (He didn’t have such a great time there, can you tell?)
My French professor in college was fluent in Persian. She told us the worst thing you can tell someone is (not sure of the spelling, but I’ll try by sounding it out):
Khafa-shi
or
Khafa-sho
They translate to “choke yourself”. She said not to ever tell anyone this unless you wanted to fight and/or die…