2010 11 16 - Rubles

I can start by saying that there are roughly 30-32 Rubles to a dollar. And secondly there is no such word as Rubles.

Yes today is a Tuesday - which means school for me so that means your in for a Language Lesson.

Language Lesson - Plurals

The whole plurals thing in Russian is a bit more complicated then English. We just have singular (one Dollar) and Plural (Two Dollars, 35 Dollars, A Hundred Dollars a Million Dollars) - You simply add an S to indicate the fact that you are dealing with more than one of an item.

In Russian there are two plural endings - ya - which is used for 2-4 items - as in Two Rublya and there is a second plural ending of -ay - for 5-10 items as in 5 Rublay.

The seperate 1, 2-4, and 5-10 endings extend up through the entire spectrum of numbers. If you are dealing with 31 it is specified as Ruble while 32-34 are Rublya and 35 would be Rublay back to 41 would be Rublya.

There is an exception to this - 11-14 are all Rublay - probably because the Russian Numbers in the teens don't quite follow the conventions of other numbers.

The same rules apply when talking about the Dollar - there are no Dollars just Dollara and Dollarov - Dollarov has a different ending then Rublee due to a gender difference for the words.

Time

Time also has the same 1, 2-4, 5+ plural differences for both hours and minutes. Russians use the same word for Time, Clock, and Watch - although they do have two words for Time.

Calendars

Russia uses the same calendar as us, but it is almost always written in vertically rather than horizontally - with the days of the week running Top to Bottom - One of the things I like is that they start the weeks on the calendar on Mondays with the weekends listed at the bottom.

Age
The whole extra plural thing extends to ages - but there is a twist - the Word for year is pronounced GOAD and is also the term for your age if it ends in a 1(exception for 11) with the plural for numbers ending in 2-4 as GOADA. But for the 5+ variations (including 11-14) the term is LET.

Phone
Phone numbers are given out in the form 123-45-67 rather than 123-4567. and rather than saying the number is ONE, TWO, THREE etc. Russians say One Hundred Twenty-Three, Forty-Five, Sixty-Seven.

There are area codes - not sure how they use overlays but Billie Jo thinks the historic Area Code for Moscow is 495.

Weather
The newscast temp in the bottom corner lists the temps in Celsius of course, but they also listen them in decimal as in -9.4 degrees - I suppose so you know precisely how cold it is. The Time is also listed in Military form and down to the second. 22:07:39 = 10:07 PM and 39 seconds. They also list something in MM which is millimeters I suspect - I don't think it is snowfall, but possibly barometric pressure - it is typically in the 750 range I think.

The Russian words for Plus and Minus are Plus and Minus - with more of a long U sounds "PLOOS" - of course sometimes in conversation a Russian may do the C -> F conversion for you but retain the "Minus" when converting a low temp ex) Minus 5 C = 23 F but they will say Minus Twenty Three - which is about what it feels like.