How do you say "I'll win" in the future tense if you're an Olympic champion? After all, "I'll run" sounds strange, and "I'll defeat" isn't even Russian! This unique verb …
How do you say "I'll win" in the future tense if you're an Olympic champion? After all, "I'll run" sounds strange, and "I'll defeat" isn't even Russian! This unique verb "to win" doesn't have a first-person singular form in the simple future tense.
Professor Dmitry Ushakov, author of the famous 1935 explanatory dictionary, called "pobedit'" (to win) an insufficient verb. The reason isn't the rules, but phonetics: the combination of "b," "zh," and "u" creates a sound that's unpleasant to the Russian ear.
Instead of using awkward forms, native speakers intuitively choose workarounds. We say "I can win," "I will achieve victory," or "I will become a winner." Even Mikhail Lomonosov couldn't have recorded such a form in his 18th-century "Russian Grammar."
This phenomenon, where a verb fails to form all its forms according to the general rules, is called defectiveness. Besides "to win," these include "to convince" (we wouldn't say "I'll run away") and "to find ourselves" in the first person singular.
So, the absence of the form "I will run" isn't a mistake, but a unique feature of the Russian language, conditioned by history and euphony. It makes our speech richer. How do you express your future victory?
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