Why do Russians sometimes say ‘until’ instead of ‘goodbye’?
Throughout the ages, ‘do vstrechi’ (‘till we [next] meet’) and ‘do svidaniya’ (‘goodbye’) transformed into a short and obscure ‘poka’ (‘until’) in Russian, that is often used in informal speech. How did it happen?
The English world says ‘bye’, the Italians say ‘ciao’, the Germans say ‘tschüss’ and Russians say ‘poka’. Friends and family members wouldn't say farewell with any other word for sure. But, it is actually a slightly new, abridged form, which didn’t exist on its own even in the early 20th century.
In Cyrillic, this word is spelled as ‘пока’. And, in the modern language, this word plays three different roles.
1. An adverb that means ‘until’, ‘yet’, ‘so far’
He hasn’t found a job yet – Он пока не нашел работу.
2. Conjunction in a sentence that means ‘while’
While it was raining, we were reading – Пока шёл дождь, мы читали.
3. As an informal ‘bye’:
He said ‘bye’ and ran away – Он сказал мне “пока” и убежал.
“I remember how terribly indignant I was when the young people, as if they had colluded with each other, began to say ‘poka’ instead of goodbye,” Kornei Chukovsky, Soviet children's author and authoritative expert in the study of Russian language stylistics, wrote in his book ‘Alive as life’ about the Russian language.
So, how is it that an adverb that has a time definition and should be used with a verb became a separate word for farewell?
The National Corpus of the Russian Language first mentioned this “formula” in the early 1920s, as Gramota.ru expert Irina Fufayeva writes. In the informal oral speech, this word started to be used in an abridged sentences:
“Посиди пока” (“Sit until…”) as an abridged oral version for ‘посиди, пока я тебя позову’ (‘Sit until I’ll call for you’).
As a result, people began to use it as a shortened way of saying ‘goodbye’.
“Пока, прощай!” wrote Russian poet Pyotr Vyazemsky in a letter to a friend in 1821. Literally, that meant “for now, goodbye”.
“А пока до свидания,” wrote Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, in 1918. This means the same “and, for now, goodbye”. The Russian “до свидания” is a respectful form of farewell and literally means “until meeting”, or “until our next meeting”.
The word “пока!” was first recorded being used even before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Poet Marina Tsvetaeva's sister wrote it in a letter, with an exclamation mark. And it became a popular new form among the creative intelligentsia.
And, after the revolution, when a more democratic form of communication was adopted, ‘пока’ as ‘bye’ began to spread into the language. So, in the 1960s, Kornei Chukovsky only recalled how surprised he had been in the 1920s… but was no longer surprised by it anymore.
This article was prepared in partnership with Gramota.ru.
