Monday, April 04, 2005, 17:33 GMT
Unfortunately, that alphabet is Greek to me. (Sorry, it's been a long day).
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RUSSIAN IS EASY!!!
Monday, April 04, 2005, 17:33 GMT
Unfortunately, that alphabet is Greek to me. (Sorry, it's been a long day).
Monday, April 04, 2005, 18:00 GMT
Then Greek it's easy too!!! Chinese as well,etc!!!
Monday, April 04, 2005, 18:22 GMT
Well, the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are just plain old, ordinary alphabetic scripts like any other, and have vowels and all, unlike some alphabetic scripts. Chinese characters, on the other hand, no matter what language they are being used for, are a whole different story unto themselves, as the characters must be learned individually, rather than simply remembered as a sequence of characters in some given script, which makes learning them far more difficult than learning something written in an alphabet, abugida (like at least most of the India scripts), or syllabary (like Hiragana and Katakana in Japanese).
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 00:28 GMT
No: Russian does have 6 cases. Mostly the same cases as Latin, minus the Vocative (except in archaisms), and instead of the Ablative it has Instrumental and Prepositional. But it is *fairly* regular. Russian has a lot of exceptions and weird bits, though. The fact that two "dva" takes the genitive singular seems bad enough, eg two boys, dva mal'chika, but it is even worse that when you add in an adjective it is genitive plural! dva vysokikh mal'chika. Ther are LOTS of hidden little devious aspects of Russian grammar.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 00:31 GMT
I should add that the explanation I gave for two tall boys, dva vysokikh mal'chika only holds for masculine nouns!!!! dvye vysokiye dyevushki is two tall girls. It gets worse and worse the more in-depth you go...
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 00:53 GMT
DJW,
dvye girls................tri=three girls to dvum girls..........to tryom girls about dvukh girls.....about tryokh girls with dvumya girls.....with tryemya girls So there is some system and order. The same with boys. dva boys...............tri boys to dvum boys............to tryom boys about dvukh boys......about tryokh boys with dvumya boys.......with tryemya boys but there is also dvoye (troye) , that means two (three) persons and it has their own declensional endings.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 01:01 GMT
and all boys and girls are high respectively :
....vysokikh ....vysokim (to) ....vysokikh (about) ....vysokimi (with)
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 01:02 GMT
I haven't seen exceptions by now :)
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 02:19 GMT
Mishka:
you miss my point. I am not talking about the case endings in isolation, but where a numeral is followed by an adjective and a noun. This is the grammatical rule (p201 Terence Wade, A comprehensive Russian grammar): Dva/Dvye, tri, chetyre take the *genitive plural* of an adjective qualifying a masculine or neuter noun, and the *nominative plural* of an adjective qualifying a feminine noun; the noun will be in the *genitive singular*. The examples are: dva bol'shix stakana, dva bol'shix okna, but tri byednye dyevushki. Further refinement: A *genitive plural* adjective is preferred with a feminine noun after 2, 3, 4, when there is a stress difference between the genitive singular and the nominative plural of the noun, eg tri vysokikh gory (stress on goRY, as opposed to nom. pl. GOry); when a distributive phrase is governed by the preposition "po", eg po tri spyelykh grushi; and in fractions and decimals. Also pre-positioned adjectives appear in the nominative plural, eg kazhdye tri minuty. Nom. sing: odin bol'shoi stakan Acc. sing. odin bol'shoi stakan Gen. sing. odnogo bol'shogo stakana Dat sing. odnomu bol'shomu stakanu Inst. sing. odnim bol'shim stakanom Prep. sing. ob odnom bol'shom stakanye Nom. pl. dva bol'shikh stakana Acc. sing. dva bol'shikh stakana Gen. sing. dvukh bol'shikh stakanov Dat. sing. dvum bol'shim stakanam Inst. sing. dvumya bol'shimi stakanami Prep. sing. o dvukh bol'shikh stakanakh Nom. sing. odna byednaya dyevushka Acc. sing. odnu byednuyu dyevushku Gen. sing. odnoi byednoi dyevushki Dat. sing. odnoi byednoi dyevushkye Inst. sing. odnoi (odnoyu) byednoi (byednoyu) dyevushkoi (dyevushkoyu) Prep. sing. ob odnoi byednoi dyevushkye Nom. pl. dvye byednye dyevushki Acc. pl. dvukh byednykh dyevushek Gen. pl. dvukh byednykh dyevushek Dat. pl. dvum byednym dyevuskham Inst. pl. dvumya byednymi dyevushkami Prep. pl. o dvukh byednykh dyevushkakh
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 02:23 GMT
Mishka, you said you hadn't seen any exceptions, although you didn't understtand my post. Consider these:
dva bol'shix stakana - what case is the MIDDLE word in? dvye byednye dyevushki - what case is the MIDDLE word in? tri vysokikh gory - what case is the MIDDLE word in? If you can answer these three questions, you have found a couple of exceptions :-)
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 07:18 GMT
DJW,
Sorry, I don't know Russian grammar too well. It's not a jesting :-) But in colloqual speech of everyday life you could hear: Gimmie te, dva - bolshiye stakany. or dvye bednykh devushki. Also, example with gora is appliсable to noga, ruka, golova, reka etc. and in all of them the stress is on the last vowel.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 08:17 GMT
Well, spoken Russian varies from person to person, but Russian learners need to learn a particular standard. I would have failed my exams had I written "dva bolshiye stakany", because that would have put the noun and the adjective in the nominative case after dva. I was trying to illustrate just how tricky Russian grammar is. There is exception after exception after exception! In fact it is not necessary to get all this exactly write, but the rule is: 1) genitive singular after 2, 3 and 4 in the case of nouns, but 2) genitive plural for masculine and neuter adjectives and 3) nominative plural for feminine adjectives, except 4) if the noun in the genitive singular contains a different stress to the nominative plural, in which ase the adjective will be in genitive plural, and 5) rules 1-4 only apply if the numeral is in the nominative; if the numeral is in an oblique case, the adjectives and nouns follow that case. As you can see, what begins as a simple rule #1 contains many exceptions.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 08:22 GMT
write should be right!
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 08:43 GMT
"Ther [sic] are LOTS of hidden little devious aspects of Russian grammar."
Not that there would be anything like that in English grammar of course. Ha ha!
Tuesday, April 05, 2005, 09:02 GMT
The thing with English grammar is that one's less likely to expect such things in the first place, English being rather analytic, and at times somewhat agglutinative, and only slightly inflecting, whereas with Russian, one is likely to expect the grammar to be complex and annoying to start with, due to it being a heavily inflecting case-heavy language to start with. Hence, the idea that English grammar may be annoying and difficult at times may seem somewhat weird, with its grammar being superficially "simple", from the viewpoint of many, even though in the end it's no more or no less complex, as a whole, but just is complex in different manners.
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