Going Bananas

To me, verbs are the coolest cats in all of language; verbs have verve. G_d Himself is a verb (at least according to certain kabbalistic understandings of Him). And some linguists suggest that all of language may have evolved out of only two kinds of words: demonstrative pronouns (word meaning this and that) and a few basic verbs.

Yet at the moment, verbs are starting to be a headache. Or at least, one verb in particular, the verb to go.

You would think a word like to go would be common to all languages. And until I started tackling Russian, I found this to be so. In French, it's aller; in Hebrew, lelechet. In English, the verb to go is so much a part of the language that it lends itself to grammatical structures (I'm going to visit my aunt tomorrow) and idioms (think of go south, go sour, and go bananas). It's impossible to imagine English without this simple, two-letter verb.

But Russian is idiosyncratic in this as, I am told, in many other respects. A Russian cannot go anywhere. He can walk, he can run, he can travel in trains, planes, and automobiles. He can go somewhere once or repeatedly, but he cannot simply go. There is not means of saying that someone goes somewhere without specifying by what means he goes, how often he goes, and whether he set out intending to return.

Not one verb for which English might simply use to go is interchangeable with any other; so to discuss simple motion in Russian, one must learn a whole host of verbs.