I'll need to check what Speak friend and enter becomes in the Russian translation of Lord of the Rings, for, come to think of it, Russian doesn't exactly have a good single word, usable without some surrounding context, for the concept.
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I'll need to check what Speak friend and enter becomes in the Russian translation of Lord of the Rings, for, come to think of it, Russian doesn't exactly have a good single word, usable without some surrounding context, for the concept. Modern textbooks generally propose 'друг' (or 'подруга', because Russian is, of course, full of unnecessary gendering), except that word already has a meaning, namely, 'other', as in 'и другие' being the Russian construct for 'et alia', 'and others'. Feudal Russian got away without differentiation because of the social peculiarity (basically, the lord didn't care about whether his peasants had friends, and when it came to the lords themselves, they didn't have friends but interests), and so in modern contexts, differentiation can't be done linguistically; it needs social context, quite heavily so. 'Подруга' is relatively distinct from 'other' in this sense, but its semantic field is more 'girlfriend' than 'friend who happens to be a girl'.
