''Glokaya kuzdra'' (russian: Глокая куздра) is a reference to a

Russian language Russian (russian: русский язык, russkij jazyk, link=no, ) is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language mainly spoken in Russia. It is the First language, native language of the Russians, and belongs to the Indo-European langua ...

phrase constructed from non-existent words in a grammatically proper way, similar to the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

phrases using the

pseudoword A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning in the lexicon. It is a kind of non-lexical vocable. A pseudoword is a specific type of non-word composed of a combina ...

gostak Gostak is a meaningless noun that is used in the phrase "the gostak distims the doshes", which is an example of how it is possible to derive meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if the referents of the terms are entirely unknown. It is an ...

". It was suggested by Russian

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

Lev Shcherba Lev Shcherba (commonly Scherba) (Russian language, Russian: Лев Влади́мирович Ще́рба, Belarusian language, Belarusian: Леў Уладзіміравіч Шчэрба) ( – December 26, 1944) was a Russian Empire and Soviet lin ...

. The full phrase is: "" ('). In the phrase, all

word stem In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics, for example, a verb stem is ...

s (-, -, -, -, -, ) are meaningless, but all

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...

es are real, used in a grammatically correct way and — which is the point — provide enough semantics for the phrase to be a perceived description of some dramatic action with a specified plot but with unknown actors. A very rough English translation (considering no semantic information is available) could be: "The glocky kuzdra shteckly budled the bocker and is kurdyaking the bockerling." Shcherba used it in his lectures in linguistics to emphasise the importance of grammar in acquiring foreign languages. The phrase was popularized by

Lev Uspensky Lev Vasilyevich Uspensky (russian: Лев Васильевич Успенский, 8 February 1900 – 18 December 1978) was a Russian writer and philologist, known for his popular science books in linguistics.popular science ''Popular Science'' (also known as ''PopSci'') is an American digital magazine carrying popular science content, which refers to articles for the general reader on science and technology subjects. ''Popular Science'' has won over 58 awards, incl ...

book ''

A Word about Words A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes'' ...

.''Uspensky, Lev
A Word About Words
', Chapter

References

Russian words and phrases Semantics {{russian-lang-stub

See also

References