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I noticed recently that there are many verbs derived from ехать by adding prefixes, such as уехать or доехать, which are all perfective, and whose imperfective forms are created by add the prefix to the iterative/frequentative form of ехать, езжать.

Question 1: why are there no verbs formed by modifying ездить?

Attempt: My guess was that this is because ездить is abstract while ехать is concrete.

But that makes no sense as an explanation, because while ходить is abstract, and идти is concrete, there are verbs formed by adding prefixes to ходить, but there are not any formed by adding prefixes to идти.

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    заездить, изъездить, наездить, объездить, поездить, проездить, съездить are the verbs which I recalled, perhaps there are some more.
    – V.V.
    Jun 20, 2017 at 16:29
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    Moreover, идти also has a lot of verbs derived from it, but that's a more complex question because идти is a special verb, which changes its root in different forms. Зайти, прийти, подойти, уйти, сойти, etc all derived from идти.
    – V.V.
    Jun 20, 2017 at 16:50
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    @Chill2Macht you may try some rhymes vocabularies, as they sort the words by the endings, so I guess would help you to find words only different in their prefixes. You may even one day start using them to write poetry, as they are intended to :-P
    – Arioch
    Jun 21, 2017 at 16:37
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    open ya.ru and search for "словарь рифм" - plenty of. The "rifmovnik" site even offers a win32 program :-D
    – Arioch
    Jun 21, 2017 at 16:48
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    one lifehack - the internet-standard dictionary protocol offers search by regular expressions. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression Sadly their main server - www.dict.org - dropped Russian vocabularies, but if you can get hands on some Linux box, they usually have some dict-server and a number of vocabularies for it. So - just see :-) imgur.com/a/wulU8
    – Arioch
    Jun 21, 2017 at 16:56

3 Answers 3

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As I have mentioned,

заездить, изъездить, наездить, объездить, выездить, поездить, проездить, съездить

are the verbs derived from ездить. Some of them have an imperfective pair in a certain meaning.

In general, ездить is a multidirectional verb (going in different directions or several times). Ехать is a unidirectional verb.

Выездить/объездить лошадь – выезжать/объезжать лошадь (verbs concerning the tamining of horses ).

The pair выезжать – выехать (to leave, depart) has a different meaning

Объездить /объехать весь мир (to travel worldwide ) doesn't have a pair. Заездить, though originated from the same source, doesn't have an imperf. pair ( to torture ).

And I believe it's really confusing, because verbs have lots of meanings and different perf/imperf. pairs. Each time people should consult a dictionary.

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I've sometimes explained it like this: ездить, like ходить, водить, and others, is a multidirectional verb.

Most multidirectional verbs can take a directional prefix (в-, вы-, при-, у-, etc.) to form an imperfective that has a nuance of direction:

входить 'to enter,' приводить 'to bring,' уносить 'to carry/take away,' etc.

Ездить is unusual in that it's not used with directional prefixes; instead, with directional prefixes we use the stem -езжать:

въезжать 'to drive/ride in,' приезжать 'to arrive,' уезжать 'to depart'

But: ездить can be used with prefixes that aren't being used in a directional sense:

поспать 'take a nap,' почитать 'read for a while,' поездить 'drive/ride around for a while'

It gets trickier when a single prefix can have more than one meaning: про- as a directional prefix meaning 'through' or 'past,' vs. про- in the sense of 'doing something for all of a certain time period.'

With the directional meaning, use -езжать;

Каждый раз, когда я проезжаю через Москву,... 'Every time I drive through Moscow...'

With the temporal meaning, use ездить:

Кстати, на Ford я проездил почти неделю, но все равно регулярно ошибался и вместо двери открывал окно. 'By the way, I drove the Ford for almost a week, but still kept messing up and opening the window instead of the door.'

V.V.'s interesting examples above (like выездить for taming a horse) can fall into this category of non-directional usage.

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To start with, here is a brief introduction into the aspectual system of Russian verbs.

In short, the main aspectual pairs shall be:

habitual - iterative: ездить - ехать

perfect - imperfect : поехать - ехать/ездить

progressive - non-progressive: поехать/ехать - поездить/ездить

Therefore

  • ездить is habitual, imperfective, non-progressive, and

  • ехать is iterative, imperfective, progressive.

Right now I cannot think of an imperfect motion verb in Russian that would also be habitual + progressive or iterative and non-progressive at the same time.

Although it might seem to be natural to suppose that a conventional language logic saldom offers an idea of an action that would be pefect and non-progressive, but there are such verbs in Russian.

E. g. поездить is a perfective and non-progressive (whether it's iterative or not is out of the scope of my answer).

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  • are habitual and iterative the same thing as abstract and concrete? Or progressive, non-progressive? I am only familiar with imperfective and perfective previously.
    – Chill2Macht
    Jun 21, 2017 at 7:31
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    @Chill2Macht in their pairs they are. Habitual is abstract habit, while iterative Is more of a concrete action. But not across pairs. Think of it as 3D space. Each axis - OX, OY, OZ - has its positive and negative directions. And positive value of X is larger than negative value of X. But you can not compare marks from different axes. It would have little sense to claim that negative Z is less X-y than positive Y :-D
    – Arioch
    Jun 21, 2017 at 16:33

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