dvye byednye dyevushki
The middle word is in genitive singular, in nominative plural and in genitive plural at the same time because the forms of "byednye" for these cases are the same (at least in Slovak language which is related to Russian)
Correction: It is in nominative plural and in genitive plural only.
Jaro, in Russian the nominative plural and genitive plural are not the same - by a long shot! The genitive plural is the hardest of the cases to form. Our lecturers regaled us with stories of debates inn government departments on the genitive plural of some nouns - but I think they were grossly exaggerating!! Adjectives are easier, though. If the middle word in the example given (dvye byednye dyevushki) were genitive singular it would byednoi; nominative plural is byednye; genitive plural is byednykh.
>>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. <<
Russian language has 9 cases:
Nominative
Genitive
Partitive (mnogo narodU, nalej chayU)
Accusative
Dative
Instrumental
Prepostitional (pogovorim o sadE)
Locative(ya v sadU)
Vocative - this is a new vocative case which doesnt have anything common with slavic vocative, it is much in demand especially in spoken language, for example - hey Peter! - ey, Pet'!
Alexej, come here - Lyosh, idi syuda!
But i agree with the last point that there are many exeptions, it s true, verbs are not so easy, especailly verbs of motion, "to go" is translated by 12 verbs and you should know where each of them is used. I dont want to emphasize that Russian is difficult, but its not easy as Esperanto or Afrikaans.
If I recall correctly, the prepositional and locative are two different names for the same thing, in the case of the Russian, and the vocative case is often not listed as being one of the cases in Russian, besides for a limited set of names, but this may not be referring to the vocative form you're speaking of here (which I've heard about in other places myself).
I forgot to mention that I also did not know that Russian has a partitive, either. Actually, I didn't know of any Indo-European languages, period, which have such a case, but some dialects of Russian could have picked up such a case from the various Uralic languages in the area, as I do know that, say, Finnish and Estonian have a partitive case, for example.
Russian does have a partitive. It is called in the Wade grammar the "partitive genitive" and is usually the same form as the genitive, eg "he drank some milk" is on vypil moloka. Some nouns have "two genitives" (this is the way Wade puts it on p90), one for use in partitive constructions. Similarly, with the locative. This is described by Wade on p57 as "an alternative prepositional singular in stressed -u" used with v and na to denote location. Relics of the former vocative casae exist in "Bozhe moi", meaning "My God", and "Gospodi or Hospodi", meaning "Good Lord". Wade says on p86: "some truncated familiar forms are used as vocatives in colloquial Russian", eg Pet' for Peter, mam for Mum etc. It is a stretch to say Russian has 9 cases. It has 6, but there are relics of 3 cases/alternative forms.
Another example of hte vocative is in the Lord's Prayer: Otche nash, "our father".
>>It is a stretch to say Russian has 9 cases. It has 6, but there are relics of 3 cases/alternative forms
No, it s not a stretch, some linguists say that russian has only 5 cases, there are many opinions on that subject and russian linguists hasnt come to a common conclusion, personnaly i think that there are 9 cases, or at least 7 as you said that partitive exists;)
>>the prepositional and locative are two different names for the same thing
possibly yes, but they have different endings, morover different meaning, look, "o sade" (prepositional) - about the garden and "v sadu" (locative) - in the garden, as we see, locative points out the place(as it must do), and prepositional has another function, close to the locative, but not the same
People should learn languages with which they are umfamiliar. What is the point of an English speaker learning any of the Latin languages when all of them share so many terms? I've been taking Spanish in school, and roughly half of the vocabulary terms in each chapter of my book are cognates. If I was in a Spanish-speaking country, I could be understood by asking about the location of a hotel, restaurant, cafe, and so on.
Linguist fails to point out that few words has a separate Partitive or Locative. I gave the page numbers of Wade's Grammar to show that the partitive is seen as a version of the genitive and the locative as a version of the prepositional, but the number of words with partitive and locative in -u is very, very small. If Linguist believes there are 9 cases in Russian, maybe he can enlighten us. What is the locative of Moskva? What is the partitive of moloko?
I myself would be rather doubtful to consider "cases" for which there are few words that are not pronouns which even can be in them to be really first-class cases as a whole, since usually cases act throughout the entire noun-adjective(-determiner) agreement system as a whole, in languages which have noun/adjective-level (rather than only, say, verb-level) agreement. So if only a few nouns can even be in a certain case, then I'm not sure if you can consider such to be a case, unless there just happens to be a full set of adjective (and determiner, if said language has determiners) conjugations for said case, in a language with such agreement, which is doubtful if said "case" is limited to just a few non-pronoun nouns. The only case in which one can get away with having a case of such a sort is if the things in said case are pronouns, which obviously don't have any determiners or adjectives to agree with in the first place, and it is not unusual for languages to have more pronominal cases than nominal cases.
What made you to decide to learn Russian? I think it's an ugly language when compared to English or other slavonic languages.
Well, I was intersted in communism at the time...
Jaro,
I find Russian very flexible (even more than English) and full of wit.
English is very analytical language. But there are a lot of languages far from that. Russian is one of them.