French affixes in Russian
Summary
Description
Information is taken from Matushansky (2023), personal communication from O. Matushansky in 2023, and from Fufaeva (2021), see also Yepishkin (2010). French affixes in Russian are mostly found on stems that are likewise borrowed from French, and the few hybrid formations often contain word play or irony.
3 agent nominalization suffixes
- -is ‘female agent’, e.g. igrok-is-a (player-agent.feminine-nominative.singular) ‘female player (in the gaming community)’.
- -ess ‘female agent’, e.g. xryč-ess-a (geezer-agent.feminine-nominative.singular) ‘name of a fictional character’. Many other formations with -ess are pseudo-foreignisms, i.e. derived from foreign stems, but most likely within Russian, e.g. kritik-ess-a (critic-agent.feminine-nominative.singular) ‘critic (woman)’, avtor-ess-a (author-agent.feminine-nominative.singular) ‘female writer (ironically)’, advokat-ess-a (lawyer-agent.feminine-nominative.singular) ‘lawyer (woman)’, frend-ess-a ‘a woman whose account is added as a “friend”, typically on Facebook’, pilot-ess-a ‘female pilot’, dramaturg-ess-a ‘female playwright (ironically)’, vampir-ess-a ‘female vampire’, got-ess-a ‘female goth (in goth community)’, politik-ess-a ‘politician (woman)’.
- -ʲor ‘male (or unmarked) agent’, e.g. uhaž-or (take.care-agent) ‘admirer’, bašn-ʲor (turret-agent) ‘turret gunner in a tank’, šum-ʲor (noise-agent) ‘sound engineer (in theaters, archaic)’. The suffix -ʲor is most productive with foreign roots and often substitutes other agent affixes during adaptation of loanwords from European languages, resulting in, among others, French volontaire borrowed as volontʲor and English boxer borrowed as boksʲor.