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In this poem by Anna Akhmatova we have:

Другая — два светлые глаза
И облачное крыло.

I don't understand why we have "два светлые глаза", I was expecting "два светлых гла́за" (светлых in the plural genitive and гла́за in the singular genitive). Indeed here is the rule I learned: if два is in the nominative and the noun that follows is masculine, then the noun should be in the singular genitive and the adjective in the plural genitive. Do we have "два светлые глаза́" (глаза́ at the plural nominative) or "два светлые гла́за" (гла́за in the singular genitive)? And why so?

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    Sounds totally wrong to me as native speaker, but maybe this usage evolved since 1963. Obviously, "два светлых глаза" would not fit the poem's rythm, so maybe Akhmatova just used this rarely used alternative to save the rythm.
    – Vosoni
    Commented Nov 4 at 15:41
  • @Vosoni Thank you for your feedback. The grammars I have are very recent and present the rule I stated as a strict rule but they are grammars for non-native speakers, so I would not be surprised if they oversimplify the situation and the grammar cited by Quassnoi is probably more precise (I found a .pdf, I will begin to use it). Your statement is very strong. I could expect that you feel it "unnatural", but "totally wrong" probably means that I should (try to) avoid saying something like that.
    – Bruno
    Commented Nov 4 at 17:03
  • Yes, you should avoid such things unless you are a famous poet who is allowed to redefine the rules of language. Above a certain level of perfection, breaking the rules is allowed, but not for us mortals.
    – Vosoni
    Commented Nov 4 at 22:42

1 Answer 1

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Do we have "два светлые глаза́" (глаза́ at the plural nominative) or "два светлые гла́за" (гла́за in the singular genitive)?

It's два светлые гла́за

Rosenthal, Справочник…, §193.1

При существительных мужского и среднего рода, зависящих от числительных два, три, четыре (а также от составных числительных, оканчивающихся на указанные цифры), определение, находящееся между числительным и существительным, в современном языке ставится, как правило, в форме родительного падежа множественного числа: два высоких дома, три больших окна, двадцать четыре деревянных стола. Например: ...Офицеры ели жадно, без разговоров, навёрстывали за два потерянных в боях дня (Шолохов); Два крайних окна в первом этаже закрыты изнутри газетными листами... (А.Н. Толстой).

(emphasis mine)

Style guides like that only mention rules if there's a chance they can be violated by a native speaker.

The noun after два, три, четыре should be in the singular genitive (which goes without saying), but the adjective that modifies it can be either in the plural nominative or in the plural genitive, the former strongly preferred for feminine nouns, the latter for masculine and neuter.

Many authors ignore this preference one way:

  • Но вот показывается на горизонте величественно-скромная фигура, полная спокойной решимости с подавляющей силою взгляда... Как воспроизведены эти два колоссальные характера. Как живы и разнообразны предстоящие (описание каждого лица не уместилось бы на странице). [К. И. Чуковский. Репин -- писатель (1930-1950)]
  • Это были три пешие негра, ведшие в поводу трех навьюченных осликов. [Вацлав Михальский. Для радости нужны двое (2005)]

and the other:

  • В одном Козельском уезде во времена Петра было сто четыре водяных мельницы на маленьких речушках. [Даниил Гранин. Зубр (1987)]
  • Четыре старших дочери повыходили замуж, живут отдельно, но у каждой своя беда, надо помогать. [Юрий Трифонов. Предварительные итоги (1970)]
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  • A useful reminder that this rule isn't 100%. Google has 322 hits for два светлых глаза and 121 hits for два светлые глаза. Please note: there is no such phrase as "singular genitive" in English. It is "genitive singular". For some reason, everyone on the Russian Stackexchange is writing "singular nominative", "plural genitive", etc, phrases that don't exist in English. The correct ones are "nominative singular", "dative plural", genitive plural", "genitive singular", etc.
    – pompey1969
    Commented Nov 3 at 6:59
  • @pompey1969: thank you for the correction. If you see any errors in my English, could you please use the edit button and fix them? Thanks in advance. That said, while "genitive plural" is indeed prevalent in English, I wouldn't go so far as to say "it doesn't exist": a brief search on Google Books finds a lot of works by, apparently, native English speakers that routinely put the number first and the case last.
    – Quassnoi
    Commented Nov 3 at 13:17
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    @pompey1969 I don't understand why I don't have the same output. Google gives me (removing "very similar" results) 100 results for "два светлых глаза" and 16 results for "два светлые глаза" (14 of them are occurrences of the poem I cited and 2 of them are not relevant because два is at the end of a sentence and светлые глаза is at the beginning of a new sentence).
    – Bruno
    Commented Nov 3 at 17:43
  • @Bruno, that's odd. Maybe Google has different results in different countries. What I did was put "два светлых глаза" in quotation marks into Google. When the results were produced, I clicked on "tools", and it told me there were "about 329 results". "два светлые глаза" now produces "about 43 results", slightly different from earlier on. Is this the method you used (i.e. inputting the query in quotation marks, and then hitting Tools)?
    – pompey1969
    Commented Nov 3 at 21:14
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    @pompey1969 Using your method I get "around 80 results" for "два светлые глаза" but I get a list of only 27 "concrete" results (without omitting "similar" results), all of them are occurrences of this poem (except two irrelevant results). In particular I was unable to find one example of "два светлые глаза" apart from this poem. There are probably many repetitions among these 80 results (for instance, this page itself maybe appears twice, once as russian.stackexchange.com/questions/27524/два-светлые-глаза and once as russian.stackexchange.com/questions - this is only a guess).
    – Bruno
    Commented Nov 3 at 22:33

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