Russian mat
Mat ( Russian мат, матерщи́на Materschchina or ма́терный язы́к Materny jasyk ) denotes a restricted, but very productive register of the obscene lexicon of Russian colloquial language . The peculiarity of this Russian vulgar language compared to other Slavic languages , in which the same or very similar words are used, consists only in the strong taboo .
description
The term originally meant something like "loud shouting" (which the phrase "орать благим матом" ("orat 'blagim matom") suggests).
The mat belongs to the Russian colloquial language; the lexicon of the mat is largely taboo.
Public use since the 1980s
Since the times of glasnost and perestroika , a few Russian films have come out that speak of Mat. Such films have an age rating of 16 or 18 years, depending on the frequency of use of the mat , so films are treated as equivalent to violence, bloodshed or explicit sexual acts. The mat thus has a completely different status than the use of swear words in German-speaking countries.
While Mat was rarely used in literature in the past and then mostly made "unrecognizable" by dots or omissions, in recent years it has also been represented in works accessible to the masses, e. B. Eduard Limonow , Wiktor Pelewin or Wladimir Sorokin .
In some varieties of punk rock and heavy metal , mat is now normal, which is reflected in the lyrics of bands such as Graschdanskaja Oborona , Krasnaya Plesen, sector Gasa or Leningrad . The pop duo tATu also protested in 2003 with T-shirts with the inscription Chui woine! ( Russian Хуй войне!; for example “Shit war!” or literally translated “Tail for the war!”) against the Iraq war and thus triggered a scandal. The Russian singer and actor Nikita Dschigurda currently uses Mat as a stylistic device in his songs and poems (e.g. his poem “ про хуй ” on YouTube ) and likes to “speak” in Mat form in interviews.
A phenomenon of the last few years has been the extensive use of the mat in the relative anonymity of the Internet, in weblogs such as LiveJournal and on special websites whose creators attribute themselves to the counterculture ( Russian контркультура ), here often in connection with special, often sexist , homophobic , Xenophobic or anti-Semitic slang or deliberately misspelling of many words.
In recent years there have also been political thoughts of legalizing Mat as a full linguistic component of the Russian language.
keywords
The Russian mat draws on four key terms, which, through prefixes and suffixes, result in an almost endless variety of nouns, adjectives and verbs:
- Chui (Russian ) - tail (the most likely origin is from Proto-Slavic hvoj : needle, something stabbing (cf. хвоя = needles (of a tree)))
- Pisda (Russian ) - cunt
- Jebat ′ (Russian ) - to fuck (from proto-Slavic jebti : to beat)
- Bljad ′ (Russian ) - whore (cf. блуд: vice, fornication, блудница = hooker, sinner)
These terms and their derived forms can, depending on the context, have many different meanings that often have nothing to do with the original meaning, e.g. B. пиздеть (pisdet ′) = "lie" (sometimes "steal") or пиздец (pisdez) = something like "doom", "catastrophe", "everything in the ass". There is also a large number of idioms that are based on Mat key terms, including the notorious “mother's ” , which is notorious well beyond the borders of the Russian-speaking area ( job twoju mat ; in German “fuck your mother”; originally also “I fucked your mother”, since job is also an outdated past tense of jebat ′ ). Expressions in the Mat are not necessarily interpreted literally, such as B. “idi na hui / cher” or “poschol na hui / cher” literally means “go on the tail”, but mean “piss off” or “leave me alone”. Other examples are “bljad”, which means “whore”, but can be said as an immediate reaction to failure, or the words “jebat” and “pisdez”, which are often called out spontaneously when there is negative surprise or mishap.
In a narrower sense, only these four key terms and the words and idioms derived from them count for the Mat. However, there are a number of other swear words in Russian that are sometimes also incorrectly ascribed to the Mat because they are considered more or less indecent and therefore - at least in the opinion of the more prudish group - also taboo. Examples of these are the following terms:
- Cher (Russian хер) - tail - usage is almost identical to that of Chui ; where the latter is used without specifically referring to the "tail", one can also use Cher without the meaning being falsified in the least. ( Cher is actually the onomatopoeic name of the Russian letter Х , which was previously used synonymously with the word cross due to the optical similarity. Thus, it is a substitute word in order not to pronounce the actual word and to carry out a kind of self-censorship; however has lost its actual meaning over time and the meaning of the words has adapted to Chui in popular usage .)
- Pidor or Pidaras (Russian пидор or пидарас, in different spellings) - despicable for homosexuals, "fagot" (derived from педераст = pederast )
- Drotschit ′ (Russian дрочить) - wank
- Gandon or Gondon (Russian гандон or гондон) - condom
- Suka (Russian сука) refers to a slut / whore / hooker. Just like the English bitch , the actual and thoroughly decent meaning is "bitch". In relation to this, there is also the expression Sukin syn ( Сукин сын - son of a bitch ).
See also
- Fuck or Seven Dirty Words in the Anglo-Saxon language area.
