☯ : what do you love about your language?
a hard question to answer for russian. the "love" for it has been and continues to be a tool of violence, imperialism, and colonisation, and many fun or interesting things about it have been perverted into a justification of superiority and domination. so i'm gonna skirt around the usual talking points and instead say that i'm grateful it gives me direct access to a lot of great literature. poetry in particular, as it is extremely hard to translate poetry in a way that retains all the poem's elements, and i love that i can open pushkin or chichibabin and just... read.
☪ : what do you hate about your language?
not a huge fan of how gendered it is. the nouns, the adjectives, many of the verbs - they are all gendered. even our surnames are gendered! like a man's surname would be ivanov but a woman's would be ivanova. it is impossible for me to speak russian without either misgendering myself with every second word or outing myself and potentially putting myself in danger. not ideal. in addition to that, the way the language has developed in that context gives way to a lot of misogyny. we still don't have feminine words for most jobs and people who try to create them are openly mocked, despite the fact that the language objectively demands them. professions which women have been in for ages do have feminine equivalents (e.g. a male teacher is 'учитель [uchitel']' while a female teacher is 'учительница [uchitel'nitsa]') but we don't have feminine equivalents to jobs like doctor, engineer, judge, lawyer, author, musician, and many many more. it is - among other things - a way to make women who work those jobs invisible.
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