Incidents of In My Language, That Sounds Like... specifically involving Russian.
- A video of an Arabian song My Homeland
, is famously known in Russian as "Furry Whores", due to the way it sounds. There are a couple of obscene subs on Youtube... very popular videos. - The Chechen word for their ethnic group is "Vainakh" (literally "our people"; more precisely, the term refers to the ethnolinguistic family that includes Chechens (Noxçi), Ingush (Ghalghai), Bats and Kists). "Voina" (pronounced "vaina") is, of course, the Russian word for "war." This is even funnier if you remember that Chechen people have been at war with Russia for the better part of the past two decades and have developed a certain image.
- Russian and Hebrew have somewhat similar phonetics, especially when the speaker has a Russian / Eastern European accent, which is often the case. This renders mundane Hebrew phrases like "worried about losing eligibility for a postdated check" or "new tabernacles (sukkot) will be built" virtually unprintable in Russian. And Russian is not exactly the language of prudes...
- In fact, the Hebrew word for 'Ugly' is also unprintable.
- In Russian, "Cherstvy", when applied to a person, means "coldhearted". It sounds like Polish "czerstwy" ("stale").
- The Russian word for boxwood is самши́т [samshit, sɐˈmʂɨt], like English "some shit" [ˌsɐm ˈʃɪtʰ].
- The Russian words for "sew" and for "shield" sound awfully like "shit" in English.
- In many Slavic languages (for example Russian, Polish, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian), the word for "brother" is "brat" or, in Cyrillic, "брат" (pronounced more like the first syllable of "bratwurst" though). English speakers with annoying siblings are usually fairly amused by this.
- Great fun tricking new students of Russian into saying the phrase "brave (smelliy) like (kahk) sugar (sahar)" ("smelly cock sucker").
- Russian факт (meaning fact) is pronounced [fäkt] with open central vowel, like fucked in Australian English.
- In Russian барак (pronounced like Barack Obama's name) means "shack". Needless to say, Russian media had much fun with that.
- Non-obscene example from Hungarian: "uborka" means "cucumber", and Russian word "уборка", which sounds the same, generally means "cleaning".
- неделя (nedelya) means "week" in Russian and "Sunday" in Bulgarian.
- Airbus sounds similar in Russian to the word for "watermelon".
- Russian letter Щ name shcha sounds like Polish "szcza" (vulgar urinates).
- "Кур" [kur] used, as in Old Slavic, to mean "rooster", but much like "cock" in English, has evolved as an euphemism for phallus (and then also became just as obscene). In Bulgarian, it has only retained that meaning, making Russian "курица" [kuritsa] ("hen") sound funny, as well as unrelated words like "курить" [kurit'] ("to smoke") and names such as "Кура" [Kura] (in Bulgarian: "The Dick") and "Курск" [Kursk].
- In Russian druzhba means "friendship". In Romanian drujba means "chainsaw". (There are historical reasons for this: a company of chainsaw-makers in the USSR decided to name their products "friendship". Romania imported lots of chainsaws with druzhba written on them, so somewhere along the line someone assumed that was the word for chainsaw.) In Croatian družba means "gang".
- Russian to English examples:
- а (a) means "and; but".
- бы (by) means "would".
- до (do) means "to; before; until".
- друг (drug) means "friend".
- мы (me) means "we".
- но (no) means "but; yet".
- он (on) means "he" and "it".
- со (so) means "with".
- то (to) means "that".
- шип (ship) means "spike; thorn".
- фартовый (fartovij) means "lucky". So does its Polish cognate fartowny.
- бра (bra) means a sort of wall-mounted lamp.
- направо (napravo) means "direct; straight; outright" in Bulgarian and "right (turn)" in Russian.
- The Romanian words for "yes" and "no" are "da" and "nu" respectively. The Russian equivalent of "Well, yes" is ну да (nu da). Similarly, the Russian phrase да ну (da nu) means "Indeed" and "You don't say". To Romanians, both phrases look like the speaker is saying "yes" or "no" then immediately contradicting themselves.
- Slovak and Russian have several words that sound alike but have different or opposite meanings:
- život (life) versus живот/zhivot (stomach)
- miešok (scrotum) versus мешок/meshok (bag, sack)
- ovocie (fruit) versus овощи/ovoshchi (vegetables)
- otkaz (message) versus отказ/otkaz (renouncement; refusal; denial)
- baňa (mine, pit) versus баня/banya (bathhouse)
- izba (room) versus изба/izba (cottage; hut; peasant's house)
- bezcenný (worthless) versus бесценный/bestsennij (priceless)
- плод (plod) means "fruit" in Bulgarian and "foetus" in Russian.
- фамилия (familiya) means "surname" in Russian and Bulgarian.
