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Blat (favors)
In Russian culture, ''blat'' () is a form of corruption comprising a system of informal agreements, exchanges of services, connections, Party contacts, or black market deals to achieve results or get ahead. In the context of corruption in the Soviet Union, ''blat'' was widespread because of the permanent shortage of consumer goods and services. This was due to the administrative-command economy and coexistent maladministration. Networks of ''blat'' made it easier for the general public to gain access to much-coveted goods and services. ''Blat'' also took place at the enterprise-level in the form of '' tolkachs'', employees whose explicit role was to exploit their networks to secure positive outcomes for their employers. The system of ''blat'' can be seen as an example of a social network with some similarities to networking (especially "good ol' boy" networks) in the United States, old boy networks in the United Kingdom and the former British Empire, and ''guanxi'' in China. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russian Culture
Russian culture ( rus, Культура России, Kul'tura Rossii, kʊlʲˈturə rɐˈsʲiɪ) has been formed by the nation's history, its geographical location and its vast expanse, religious and social traditions, and both Eastern culture, Eastern and Western culture, Western influence. Cultural scientists believe that the influence of the East was fairly insignificant, since the Mongols did not coexist with the Russians during conquest, and the indigenous peoples were rather subjected to reverse cultural assimilation. Unlike the Scandinavian and more Western Europe, western neighbors, which have become the main reason for the formation of modern culture among Russians. Russian Russian literature, writers and Russian philosophy, philosophers have played an important role in the development of Western philosophy, European thought. The Russians have also greatly influenced classical music, Russian ballet, ballet, theatre, List of Russian artists, painting, Cinema of Russia, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guanxi
''Guanxi'' () is a term used in Chinese culture to describe an individual's social network of mutually beneficial personal and business relationships. The character ''guan'', 关, means "closed" and "caring" while the character ''xi'' 系 means "system" and together the term refers to a closed caring system of relationships that is somewhat analogous to the term old boy's network in the West. In Western media, the pinyin romanization ''guanxi'' is more widely used than common translations such as "connections" or "relationships" because those terms do not capture the significance of a person's ''guanxi'' to most personal and business dealings in China. Unlike in the West, ''guanxi'' relationships are almost never established purely through formal meetings but must also include spending time to get to know each other during tea sessions, dinner banquets, or other personal meetings. Essentially, ''guanxi'' requires a personal bond before any business relationship can develop. As ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compadrazgo
The term compadre (, , literally "co-father" or "co-parent"), known in Slavic countries as kum ( Russian and Ukrainian: кум, ; masculine derived from Balkan Vulgar Latin ''cómmater'' - "godmother") denotes the relationship between the parents and godparents of a child and is an important bond that originates when a child is baptised. It is widespread in Iberian, Latin American, Filipino Christian and Indian Goan Christian Brahmin families, as well as in some countries of Eastern Europe, such as Russia and Ukraine. The abstract nouns compadrazgo (Spanish and Filipino) and compadrio (Portuguese), both meaning "co-parenthood," are sometimes used to refer to the institutional relationship between ''compadres''. The analogous words in Eastern Slavic languages are kumovstvo (, ) or kumivstvo (, ). At the moment of baptism, the godparents and natural parents become each other's ''compadres'' (the plural form ''compadres'' includes both male and female co-parents). The female e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fenya
Fenya ( rus, феня, p=ˈfʲenʲə) or fen'ka ( rus, фенька, p=ˈfʲenʲkə) is a Russian cant language originated among the travelling peddlers and currently used in the Russian criminal underworld and among former detainees of Russian penal establishments (" prison slang"). In modern Russian language it is also referred to as blatnoy language (), where "blatnoy" is a slang expression for "professional criminal". It is also widely used in "thieves' songs" (Russian: "blatnaya pesnya"). Etymology Initially, this was the name of the Ofenya language (, formerly "Suzdal dialect"). This is a language that was formed in Russia, in the Middle Ages, and was originally used by the ''ofenyas'' (travelling peddlers). The god-haulers — "ofenyas engaged in the resale of icons" created a cryptolanguage, inventing new roots and leaving the traditional Russian morphology, and used this invented language to communicate "not for other people's ears". Overview The grammar of fenya is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Krysha
A protection racket is a type of racket and a scheme of organized crime perpetrated by a potentially hazardous organized crime group that generally guarantees protection outside the sanction of the law to another entity or individual from violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, and other such threats, in exchange for payments at regular intervals. Each payment is called "protection money" or a "protection fee". An organized crime group determines an affordable or reasonable fee by negotiating with each of its payers, to ensure that each payer can pay the fee on a regular basis and on time. Protections rackets can vary in terms of their levels of sophistication or organization. The perpetrators of a protection racket may protect vulnerable targets from other dangerous individuals and groups or may simply offer to refrain from themselves carrying out attacks on the targets, and usually both of these forms of protection are implied in the racket. Due to the frequent i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughly one-sixth of the world's landmass, making it the list of largest empires, third-largest empire in history, behind only the British Empire, British and Mongol Empire, Mongol empires. It also Russian colonization of North America, colonized Alaska between 1799 and 1867. The empire's 1897 census, the only one it conducted, found a population of 125.6 million with considerable ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socioeconomic diversity. From the 10th to 17th centuries, the Russians had been ruled by a noble class known as the boyars, above whom was the tsar, an absolute monarch. The groundwork of the Russian Empire was laid by Ivan III (), who greatly expanded his domain, established a centralized Russian national state, and secured inde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Loanword
A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term that is well established in the linguistic field despite its acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything (i.e., the loanword). Loanwords may be contrasted with calques, in which a word is borrowed into the recipient language by being directly translated from the donor language rather than being adopted in (an approximation of) its original form. They must also be distinguished from cognates, which are words in two or more related languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin in the ancestral language, rather than because one borrowed the word from the other. Examples and related terms A loanword is distinguished from a calque (or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polish Language
Polish (, , or simply , ) is a West Slavic languages, West Slavic language of the Lechitic languages, Lechitic subgroup, within the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family, and is written in the Latin script. It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth-most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional Dialects of Polish, dialects. It maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, Honorifics (linguistics), honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals. The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions (, , , , , , , , ) to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet, while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet. The traditional set compri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yiddish
Yiddish, historically Judeo-German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in 9th-century Central Europe, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew language, Hebrew (notably Mishnaic Hebrew, Mishnaic) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages.Aram Yardumian"A Tale of Two Hypotheses: Genetics and the Ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jewry".University of Pennsylvania. 2013. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet. Prior to World War II, there were 11–13 million speakers. 85% of the approximately 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,Solomon Birnbaum, ''Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache'' (4., erg. Aufl., Hamburg: Buske, 1984), p. 3. leading to a massive decline in the use of the language. Jewish ass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Vasmer
Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (; ; 28 February 1886 – 30 November 1962) was a Russian and German linguist. He studied problems of etymology in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worked on the history of Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, and Finno-Ugric peoples. Biography Max Vasmer was born on 28 February 1886 to German parents in Saint Petersburg. Vasmer graduated from Saint Petersburg University in 1907 as a student of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Aleksey Shakhmatov. From 1907 to 1908, he studied Greek dialects and the Albanian language in Greece. He continued to study at the universities of Krakow and Vienna from 1908 to 1910. From 1910, he delivered lectures and taught at the Bestuzhev Courses in 1912. During the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, he worked in the universities of Saratov (1917–1918) and Dorpat (1918–1921). From 1921 to 1925, he taught at the University of Leipzig, and from 1925 to 1945, he taught at the University of Berlin. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adverb
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by answering questions such as ''how'', ''in what way'', ''when'', ''where'', ''to what extent''. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by an individual adverb, by an adverbial phrase, or by an adverbial clause. Adverbs are traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech. Modern linguists note that the term ''adverb'' has come to be used as a kind of "catch-all" category, used to classify words with various types of syntactic behavior, not necessarily having much in common except that they do not fit into any of the other available categories (noun, adjective, preposition, etc.). Functions The English word ''adverb'' derives (through French) from Latin ''adverbium'', from ''ad-'' ('to'), ''verbum'' ('word', 'ver ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
