Bad Latin, Barbarous Inglishe and Broken French
Translation, Grace, and the Stone of Stumbling

I’m learning Russian at the moment in order to read Russian poetry. My teacher is a woman in Kyiv, a war widow, who speaks to her older daughter in Russian and her younger daughter in Ukrainian. She is trying to decide whether she should leave. Our cleaning lady is also from Kyiv. She came to France with two young children. A couple of years ago when she first started working for us, she couldn’t speak any French and we communicated via bits of English and her phone’s translation app. But now she speaks French quite well and we no longer have to go via her phone. Since noticing my Russian textbooks and asking me about it, she speaks patient, slow Russian to me, complete with helpful gestures. The other day, when she arrived, I said ‘dobrey dyen’ (good morning in Russian) and then
I asked her, in my broken Russian, how to say ‘dobrey dyen’ in Ukrainian, thinking that it would be polite to learn a few key phrases in her own language. ‘Dobrey dyen’, she replied.

When she came last week, I wanted to explain that I had an online meeting. I didn’t know the Russian word, so I tried meeting. She looked puzzled and broke into a vigorous mime of someone waving a placard and shouting ‘Putin, Putin’, which took me by surprise. Next she tried a French word, démonstration, and the penny dropped. Meeting is Ukrainian (and perhaps Russian, too) for a demo – in the English sense; though actually the French word isn’t really démonstration (you use that for the ...