The 'LANGUAGE' locale variable - how to set English as primary language? A bug in gettext?

The "LANGUAGE" variable is supposed to set the default language and can be used to specify a set of languages, where the next language will be used if a message is not available in the first (previous) one. For example (as from gettext example) with 'sv:de' variable's value programs will show messages in Swedish and if such text is not found then in German.

Ok. Let's I want to use English language as my primary language and some other (let's say Russian laguage ;) ) as secondary:

export LANGUAGE=en:ru; blabla
blabla: команда не найдена
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
**Russian error message used**

Ok. Let's try another order:

export LANGUAGE=ru:en; blabla
blabla: команда не найдена
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
**Russian error message used again**

In the other words, it doesn't matter on which position English language was specified, it always has the lowest priority and a message will be shown at any other specified language if the message is defined for that language. The question - how can I specify English language as primary and any other language as secondary? And what's going on with the LANGUAGE variable?

P.S. I am very sorry for myEnglish.