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My Russian for beginners textbook has (it describes a shopping mall) the following sentence:
..., а также есть книжный и ювелирный магазины. (In case it's relevant, I can also provide the first part of the sentence.)
Why are "книжный" and "ювелирный" in the singular, but "магазины" in the plural? To confirm that it's not a mistake, I also googled for "книжный магазины" and got many results.
Thank you!
When we have two shops it's obvious we say магазины. But the shops are different. One shop sells books, the other sells jewellery. In Russian we don't repeat one noun twice in the same sentence. You can't say книжный магазин и ювелирный магазин. The repeated noun is considered redundant, so we unite the shops showing the quality separately. Since the quality adjectives belong to each shop we preserve them in the singular. That is logical. So as a result we have книжный (the first) и ювелирный (the second) магазины.
