Timeline for Animate nouns - how to detect them without knowledge of Accusative
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
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| Jun 18, 2020 at 8:26 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Feb 20, 2013 at 14:02 | history | edited | Olga | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 21 characters in body
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| Feb 20, 2013 at 10:26 | comment | added | Olga | @KCd I see your point now. Yes, very true, adjectives in general are a very good indicator of the morphological properties of nouns that they describe. Let me only note that it is not only helpful for native speakers, but for everyone who reads a text in Russian, sees a new word and by adjective ending figures out its gender, animateness and other properties. | |
| Feb 20, 2013 at 9:37 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | @KCd - I did understand what you said, I just wanted to add, that, from the practical point of view, a learner of Russian cannot know the correct form of adjectives used with this or that noun, but it's easy for a learner to find out the plural case endings. | |
| Feb 20, 2013 at 1:11 | comment | added | KCd | @YellowSky: What I had said is not contradicted by your comment, and I think I am 100% right. I didn't intend to suggest that the adjectival ending for a noun in one particular case/number distinguishes animate and inanimate (or indicates the gender), but rather that the whole system of adjectival endings that fit a particular noun reveals these features of the noun. If the decision can be made by looking at a limited set of cases/numbers, that is nice (e.g., you note that plural cases are sufficient), but all I meant to say was that the whole system of adjectives tells natives how things go. | |
| Feb 20, 2013 at 1:04 | comment | added | KCd | @Umari: My comment was not meant for someone who never learned Russian, and it can't help someone who isn't essentially at the level of a native speaker. I made the comment only because I thought it was illuminating when I found out that apparent "exceptions" to some features of nouns (like папа being assigned the masculine gender even though its endings are all feminine) disappear completely if you think about the situation in another way. I'm not at the level of a native speaker and can't use my comment above, but it's nice to know there is some point of view that is totally systematic. | |
| Feb 20, 2013 at 0:48 | comment | added | KCd | @Olga: I am not suggesting that your answer be changed. | |
| Feb 19, 2013 at 18:02 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | @KCd - You're not 100% right. Animate nouns of the 1st declension (masc. and fem. ending in -a, like папа and коллега) and of the 3rd declension (fem. ending in -ь, like дочь and лань), together with neuter gender 2nd declension animate nouns (like чудовище) really don't have any explicit indication of their animateness in the singular, but all of them show the typical Acc. = Gen. in the plural, so the rule of thumb is to have a look at the plural case forms of a noun to tell if it is animate or not (naturally, if it is declinable). | |
| Feb 19, 2013 at 15:46 | comment | added | petajamaja | @KCd, let's imagine some person has never learnt Russian. How should they know what adjective ending is required if they don't even know if the noun is animate or not? | |
| Feb 19, 2013 at 14:12 | comment | added | Olga | @KCd Do you suggest that I change my answer? How exactly? | |
| Feb 19, 2013 at 13:36 | comment | added | KCd | Whether a noun is animate or inanimate, along with what gender a noun has, is reflected without exception not by its own endings, but by the endings of the adjectives that are used with it. For instance, папа "is" grammatically masculine because adjectives that modify it have masculine endings, regardless of the endings on папа looking feminine. And коллега has общий род since it can take adjectives of either gender (depending on the colleague). Similarly, the way to know a noun is animate or not, without exception, is in fact to look at the adjectives that modify it. | |
| Feb 19, 2013 at 12:55 | history | edited | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
edited body
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| Feb 19, 2013 at 12:22 | history | edited | Olga | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added comments by Quassnoi and YellowDog
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| Feb 19, 2013 at 12:14 | comment | added | Olga | @YellowSky Feel free to edit the answer to add further exceptions on your own. | |
| Feb 19, 2013 at 8:38 | comment | added | Quassnoi♦ | Also foods: есть кальмары/кальмаров but only изучать кальмаров в среде их обитания | |
| Feb 19, 2013 at 8:00 | vote | accept | petajamaja | ||
| Feb 19, 2013 at 0:04 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | I suggest to give the complete list of exceptions, since that was the thing Umari asked about. Could you, please, add марионетка, матрёшка and робот to the list of anthropomorphuous objects? | |
| Feb 18, 2013 at 23:21 | history | edited | Olga | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
now my answer is ready!
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| Feb 18, 2013 at 23:09 | history | answered | Olga | CC BY-SA 3.0 |