NO WONDER VICTOR KEEPS USING FAIRYTALE ANALOGIES WHEN DESCRIBING HIM.
This dashing, confident(!!) young man who sweeps Russian living legends off their feet and shows them life and love. 1,000/10 for making Victor’s fairytale daydreams come true daily.
things that are not so good: listening to the yoi soundtrack in public and being constantly paranoid of accidentally unlocking your phone so the album art comes on your screen and someone next to you happening to glance down and see victor nikiforov’s entire ass right there
Not just Russians – I think all Slavic languages work like this haha (Polish does, anyway, and that’s my area of expertise). I know “why wasn’t this included” is a rhetorical question but I think some people might be genuinely curious why, so allow me to explain: because it’s normal to do it in Russian/Polish. It is a normal part of the language and something most people do to different extents, whereas it doesn’t really exist in English so you have to reduce everything to baby-talk and it ends up being… pretty weird, like the person suddenly regressed to a mental age of 5, or something.
In Slavic languages it’s a way to express affection – either to the object itself or to the person related to the object – the “cakey” in this case. In English doing this sounds like you’re trying too hard to be cutesy and it comes off as pretty ditzy. And sure, in Slavic languages it’s also a way to sound cute, but it’s also a way to be funny, to some extent (which I can’t really explain but I suppose it’s funny because you exaggerate the smallness of something). It’s only a problem if you use it in every noun in every sentence because then again you become ditzy.
This also doesn’t work in English (or Japanese, for that matter, since that’s what the anime originally is) because contrary to Russian, these two languages don’t have diminutives, not the way Slavic languages do, anyway. Let’s take the “cakey”, again. Cake in Russian is “tort”, diminutive is “tortik”, literally meaning “small cake”. Both of these are normal Russian words. Meanwhile “cakey” is… not a thing in English. And things get even more complicated when you go back to Japanese because there’s literally no way to convey “tortik” in words, unless you say cake-chan, and we can agree that’s just dumb lol. Japanese is more about how you say things instead of what you say (so tone, particles at the ends of sentences, etc), and I’d argue Victor does do this to an extent in Japanese. Not to Russian levels though, because then he’d just sound like an anime schoolgirl lol.
Anyway, point being: Slavic diminutives don’t translate well into non-Slavic languages. While I do think Victor talking like that in Russian would be really cute, the anime is Japanese so there’s no real way to achieve that, and even in English, the balance between “quirky Russian” and “a complete dumbass” is hard to strike.
Am I understand well and they ment to say: “A dla mojego mężusia maluteńki kawałeczek torciku. To wyjątek bo zazwyczaj jest na diecie. Dziękuję~ <3” ?
Honestly it’s even in Polish sounds… odd… I mean yeah… in Slavic languages diminutives are common, but still when we use them too often it’s strange. Just it’s not how we talk all the time.
I think it’s more like “kawałeczek torciku” without “maluteńki” but even then it’s pretty… excessive. xD Still, I think it sounds better in Polish than English, and probably even better in Russian. Just, yeah, if you use too many diminutives it’ll feel unnatural in any language lol.
v-niliforov 