A Pet Project

Not too long ago, I was looking for different Teach Yourself Russian courses, to find one that was both effective and reasonably priced. I made a point of reading Amazon reviews and whatever other information I could find on the internet. Most of the reviews I read were not particularly helpful, but I did read one for Rosetta Stone Russian that made me steer clear of it altogether.

Despite its high price--a full course in any language can cost as much as $450--Rosetta Stone courses have become bestsellers in the crash foreign language field. But from what my helpful reviewer said, the courses suffer from a pretty major conceptual flaw. You see, the courses are not really designed specifically for each language. One version was created for people attempting to learn English and then simply translated into the various languages Rosetta Stone offers.

What's the problem with this? Well, according to my reviewer of the Russian Rosetta Stone, it can result in some highly erroneous usages of the target language. My reviewer noted, for instance, a computer pop-up that asked the learner to identify which of four animals--a cat, a dog, a fish, and a cow--was not a "domesticated animal." This is actually nonsensical in Russian, because all four of these creatures would be considered "domestical animals", as they would be in English.

How did an error like this creep into the Russian Rosetta Stone program? Most likely, the reviewer surmised, because in the original English version of Rosetta Stone, the word translated into the Russian program as "domesticated animal" was the simple word "pet". But, according to the reviewer, Russian does not have a word for "pet" in the sense of an animal kept for fun or companionship, rather than for its ability to produce milk, meat, or fur.

Thus assertion prompted me to do a bit of investigation. An online translator I looked at translated "pet" as любимчик ("lyoobimchik"). Even with my limited background in Russian, I can tell this word has nothing to do with the animal kingdom. любимчик is clearly related, somehow, to the verb любить ("lyoobit"), meaning "to like" or "to love". So this word more likely means "pet" in the sense of "loved one", not in the sense of a creature that eats kibble and sleeps at the end of your bed.

I've also checked out the dictionary I bought for going to Russia, the Pocket Oxford Russian Dictionary. Although not the most exhaustive Russian-English dictionary available, it has the advantage of being the one readily available to your roving reporter. The English-to-Russian section of the dictionary lists two translations for "pet":, питомец ("pitometz") and домашнее животное ("domashnyee zhebotnayeh"). The latter word is clearly the one meaning "domesticated animal" misued by Rosetta Stone. So I tried to see what I could find on the first word, питомец ("pitometz").

The only real resource I have for investigating питомец ("pitometz") is the Russian-to-English section of the dictionary. But when I looked it up, Oxford had no listing for питомец ("pitometz"). What this indicates to me is that, whatever питомец ("pitometz") might mean, it's not a word in widespread use. If it were, the word would have an entry.

When I mentioned this to my parents, they both seemed amazed that Russian, or any language, could get along without so basic a word as "pet". But it's fairly conceivable to me that Russians simply do not divide the animal kingdom into "animals kept for a useful purpose" (notably, Russian does have a word for "livestock") and "animals kept for fun and companionship" (pets). It is possible that in the context of the Russian life before the twentieth century, no one kept an animal strictly for companionship. Dogs were valuable for hunting, cats for catching mice. People may just not have been able to be as sentimental about animals as we are.

On the other hand, one has to be careful about such assumptions. Looking at the world's languages, it is easy to assume that people other groups of people do not speak or write the way we do, they do not think the way we do, either. But such assumptions are often unfounded. Russian and Hebrew, for instance, both lack a verb equivalent to the English verb to have. But this does not mean that either Russian or Israelite/Jewish cultures lack a concept of possession; the Torah, after all, is replete with rules for handling property disputes. Rather, these languages simply deal with possession in a different way. In Russian or Hebrew, you indicate that some has something by saying that the thing is to him--"John has a car" would come out as "a car is to John". Linguistic determinism has major pitfalls.

Nonetheless, learning that Russian does not have a direct translation for "pet" reminded me of a brief adventure I had during my time being unemployed in New York. For about a week last summer, I did some freelance writing work for an attorney whose pet project is pet trusts. Yes, you read that right--pet trusts. There are actually lawyers in this world who make a living making sure that Fluffy and Fido will be taken care of and provided for in the event of your demise.

Incidentally, contrary to what about eighty million movies and television shows would have you believe, there are no eccentric millionaires who leave their entire estate to their pets. The closest you can get to this, legally, is establishing a trust that can be used for your pet's food and medical care, but courts and sometimes statut es limit the amount of money that can be placed in such a trust to what is reasonable for the pet's basic maintenance. While some wealthy people do choose to provide for their pets lavishly, and even excessively, through these trusts, there are no giant fortunes tied up in dogs and cats. You cannot will $100,000,000 to Fluffy.

I have no idea how I would even begin to explain to a Russian my experience working for the Pet Trust lady. I imagine that our culture's willingness to allow the establishment of "pet trusts" may be directly related to our having a word and concept of a "pet". Or the persistent myth of millionaires leaving their millions to their pets. But it's interesting that a habit of thought one would think is universal turns out to be so culturally defined. You certainly don't think of "pet" as a cultural term. It is used among all the English-speaking peoples; Britons, Canadians, Americans, South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders all refer to their canine and feline friends as "pets".

I am beginning to wonder what a culture-free language would actually look like. As I noted in an earlier post, artificial languages created to be "universal" often prove to be much less universal than they claim (like Esperanto, which is based on European grammatical structures and largely on European vocabulary), being very clipped in what they can say (like various forms of English redesigned for business or international use), or are forced to express complex concepts in very roundabout ways (so that a bagel might end up being a chewy round hole bread or something similar). So how far can a language go before it is forced to make cultural choices?

From what I've seen, not very far.