Geno's Speech Pattern[]
[Text provided by pollyrepeat. Originally posted by snickfic on Tumblr]
Geno almost never uses the past tense; he has his own construction for it. He seems to use “I’m” to denote instances of past tense, i.e. “I’m lost my gear too, you know,” to indicate something that has already happened, and then switching immediately to “I play with my all new gear” to indicate present. Which means that “But I know I’m score” or “I’m score” is Geno saying “But I knew I would score” and “I scored.” It’s Geno indicating a tense change in a really consistent way and is pretty ingenious because it means so much less conjugating; even now, when his English has gotten so good, he sticks with it, even when he does successfully conjugate all or part of the sentence.
Geno does, in fact, use “you” when he’s speaking to someone, rather than the third-person that shows up in fic all the time. It's possible that this is due to a bit of a misunderstanding. He does use names a lot, and because his sentence structure is so pared down they seem a little more noticeable, but he would say, “Sid! Look!” to ask someone to look at Sid, and he would say, “Sid, look,” to ask Sid to look at something, but he wouldn’t say “Sid look?” That comma is really important! He would say “You look?” instead.
He ignores articles and tenses in general (uses the I’m instead):
- “Exciting, long time not win.”
- “It’s little bit bad hands.”
He goes for the simplest, most straight-forward construction possible, cutting out a lot of the difficult stuff that is not actually necessary to get his point across.
Here's an example of Geno's syntax:
- “Why you say I’m never backcheck?”
1) He cuts out extraneous words.
2) Uses “you” rather than third-person name.
3) Uses “I’m” to indicate that he’s referring to past instances of being accused of failing to backcheck, even if it doesn’t map perfectly onto the way we would use tenses in the ‘proper’ English construction of the sentence.
[Added comment from hazel3017]
Here's a tip from an ESL speaker: When/If you are writing Geno’s dialogue, try not to have him refer to people he’s speaking directly to in the 3rd person. He would most likely be using “you” instead of the name of the person he's talking to. “You” would be infinitely easier for him to use, and saying “Would Sid like a drink?” when speaking to Sid instead of “Would you like a drink?” not only reads awkward but would sound incredibly awkward as well. Here's an example of a conversation between Geno, Sid, and Pascal Dupuis:
Duper: Sid's captain.
Geno: He's always captain. [To Sid] Why you? You're too young.
Sid: I know. [video]
Geno loses a lot of "little words" in English by using really literal translations from Russian to English. For example, where you would say "Where is the door?" in English, that would translate as "Where door" (где дверьin) in Russian. Or "This is the table" in English, which in Russian translates to "this (is) (the) table" (это таблица - eto tablitsa).
Naming Traditions In Russia[]
Geno's full name is Evgeni Vladimirovich Malkin (Евгений Владимирович Малкин). The "middle name" is not actually a middle name, but is a patronymic. Patronymics are derived from the first name of the person's father and means "son/daughter of". Since Geno's father's first name is Vladimir, his patronymic means "son of Vladimir". The -ovich suffix describes the gender of the parent and thus the person, with -ovich, -evich and -ich being for men and -ovna, -evna and -inichna being for women.[1] Exceptions to these rules and complications exist.[2] Notice that in Russia, most last names also vary depending on the gender of the person, usually just by adding the suffix -a to the male version of the surname. Special cases being names ending in -ski which becomes the female -skaya and surnames ending in -ii or -oi which becomes -aya.[3] Furthermore, a lot of given names have different versions depending on gender, but for these, it's easiest to just google them if necessary, since there are no hard rules. All of this put together means that if Geno was a girl her name would be Evgenia Vlamirovna Malkina (Евгения Владимировна Малкина).
Due to different styles of transliteration (the process of changing Russian from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet[4]), Geno's first name might be written as Evgeni, Evgeniy, Evgeny, Evgenii, Evgueni, Eugeny, Eugeniy, Ievgeny, Jevgeni, Jevgeny, Yevgeny, Yevgeni, Yevgeniy or even Eugene.[5] All of these are technically correct.
The correct pronounciation of "Evgeni Malkin" by native Russian speakers can be found here.
Due to the length of the average Russian given name, most names have at least one "default" nickname, often several. The nickname for Evgeni (Евгений) is Zhenya (Женя). The correct pronounciation of Zhenya can be found here. A list of other common names with their nicknames can be found here.
Miscellaneous[]
Check out this page for useful words and phrases in Russian.