Can anyone tell me if the Russian word “чистым” is cognate to the English word “pristine?”
Chisteem is a conjugation (the “we” form, I think?) of Chistit, which is a verb which means “to clean/prepare” and often relates to food. Its a generic term for acts like peeling potatoes, washing greens, or shucking corn… doing whatever you need to do to make the food, food.
It can also refer to personal cleaning like brushing your teeth.
Pristine is an adjective, not a verb, and comes from Latin. In English it doesn’t have a verb form (pristinate? nah), I don’t know about Latin.
So I’m no expert but I’d say they are unrelated.
Thanks! I didn’t really think the consonants lent themselves to the words being related, but the sorta-rhyme made me wonder anyway.
Question triggered by this bumper sticker. It sounds like this word for “clean” is not the right nuance here, and I don’t know why they didn’t just use the word for “blue.” Oh well.
Apparently, its Latin cognate is scindō, “I separate”. The notion behind the Russian is something like “filtered,” as in “bad stuff separated out.” (This from Terrence Wade’s dictionary of Russian etymology.)
ETA: “pristine” is from Latin pristinus, “former, original” and thus “pure.”
Then I guess the sticker is indeed using a correct word for clean. Thanks! This is why I can’t get anything finished - I can’t even buy a bumper sticker without a couple of hours of research, apparently (fiddling with Google Translate, mostly!).
The second person plural of the verb “to clean” чистить would be чистим.
чистым is the instrumental of the adjective чистый.
Used alone that way, it functions as an adverb. The slogan literally says “Preserve Taho in a clean manner.”
Actually, in this case the word чистым is a predicative adjective and doesn’t refer to the act of preserving but the state of the object. These are often in the intrumental case in russian, especially after verbs like the russian equivalents of “be”, “become”, “appear to be”, “remain” etc.
Also related to English “shit” (“something which separates itself from the body”, via Germanic.) No, I’m not kidding. Practically the opposite of “clean”! Ah, the vagaries of lexical semantic evolution…
Thanks! An awful lot has skedaddled out of my brain over the years. Including, possibly, everything I ever knew about the instrumental case. Much appreciated corrections!