Duo Russian Grammar

69) Morphology

Though English has words like undergo, ongoing or rearrange, making new words from old ones is not a particularly productive way of building the core vocabulary in the English language. Russian has quite a number of prefixes and suffixes routinely used in words, including those in your essential vocabulary.

Such verbs have natural polysemy (in layman's terms: a handful of somewhat related meanings). For example, собрать means both "to gather, to pick up" (eg. flowers) and "to assemble" (eg. an IKEA chair). Both meanings grow from the parts that comprise the word: брать is "to take, to pick", and со- adds a meaning of "togetherness".

Some prefixes

  • пере- has a rough meaning of re- or over-doing, passing some limit or extensively doing the action.
  • раз-/рас- often expresses action "outward", scattering or splitting apart (physically or metaphorically). It also has a meaning of inducing an "excited" state.
  • про mimics its behaviour with verbs of motion and has a rough meaning of an action that went past its intended goal, "thorough" action or action that goes through something (e.g. проверить "to check", пропустить "to miss; to let through", провалиться "to fall though / to fail")

It is important to understand that only a few prefixes are like «пере», i.e. have a very focused meaning. Most Russian prefixes behave similarly to English prepositions when you add them to English verbs as particles. One's knowledge of English helps one guess what "turn up", "take off" or "run out" may mean. However, you can never be sure without a dictionary or a context that makes the meaning obvious (or you can ask someone to explain the word to you).

Levels

  1. 1) Alphabet 1
  2. 2) Basics 1
  3. 3) Phrases 1
  4. 4) Единственное число
  5. 5) Name and polite "You"
  6. 6) Plurals
  7. 7) Where is it?
  8. 8) Animals 1
  9. 9) Genitive Case - 1
  10. 10) Possessive Modifiers 1
  11. 11) Partitive
  12. 12) Accusative Case: the direct object
  13. 13) Verbs Present 1
  14. 14) Infinitive, Likes and Dislikes
  15. 15) Food
  16. 16) Adjectives Introduction
  17. 17) Conjunctions
  18. 18) There is
  19. 19) Questions
  20. 20) People 1
  21. 21) Around you
  22. 22) Prepositions and Places
  23. 23) Verbs Present 2
  24. 24) Time and Numbers
  25. 25) Family
  26. 26) People 1
  27. 27) Weather and Nature
  28. 28) Sport
  29. 29) Adjectives 1
  30. 30) Past & Infinitive
  31. 31) VLAD
  32. 32) Dative and Plurals
  33. 33) Reported speech
  34. 34) Perfective Verbs
  35. 35) I
  36. 36) Body and Health
  37. 37) Genitive Plural
  38. 38) Adjectives 2
  39. 39) Short and Long
  40. 40) Perfective verbs
  41. 41) Countries and Places
  42. 42) House
  43. 43) Reflexive
  44. 44) Time expressions 2
  45. 45) Imperative and Adverbs
  46. 46) Образовние
  47. 47) City and People
  48. 48) Imperative2
  49. 49) That Which
  50. 50) Technics
  51. 51) Future Simple
  52. 52) Being Instrumental
  53. 53) Placing Objects
  54. 54) Kitchen and Food
  55. 55) Speaking
  56. 56) Subjunctive
  57. 57) Compound Future
  58. 58) Prefixed Verbs of Motion
  59. 59) Arts & Entertainment
  60. 60) Together
  61. 61) Numbers 2
  62. 62) Adjectives 3
  63. 63) Plans
  64. 64) Prepositions 2
  65. 65) The Same
  66. 66) Fleeting Vowels
  67. 67) Measure
  68. 68) Business
  69. 69) Morphology
  70. 70) History & Fantasy
  71. 71) Participles
  72. 72) Computers & Internet
  73. 73) Adverbial Participles
  74. 74) Science
  75. 75) Politics
  76. 76) Spiritual
  77. 77) Some Spoken Patterns
  78. 78) Nothing Left
  79. 79) Crime and Justice