31
votes
Accepted
How come the Russian cognate for the Czech word "čerstvý" (fresh) means entirely the opposite thing (stale)?
Looking at the meanings of cognates of the Proto-Slavic čь̑rstvъ, one can notice the common meaning 'hard', 'strong', 'sharp'. I guess the Czechs and the Slovaks view fresh bread as 'hard on the ...
- 16.7k
23
votes
Accepted
Can we call forms like "Зин", "Дим", "мам", "пап" vocative case?
The new vocative has nothing to do with the old vocative (whose forms would've been *Маше, *Зино and *Димо, indistinguishable by ear from the nominative but probably reflected in writing).
If we are ...
- 19.2k
18
votes
Can we call forms like "Зин", "Дим", "мам", "пап" vocative case?
I totally agree with the answer Nikolay provided, I just want to add one other important points made by opponents of calling this new forms vocative case, here's a quote:
Основное различие – с ...
- 38k
15
votes
How come the Russian cognate for the Czech word "čerstvý" (fresh) means entirely the opposite thing (stale)?
I decided to turn my comment into an answer and add some references, etc.
It is a very common phenomenon in related (but, nonetheless, different !) languages. A common language splits into branches ...
- 3,012
8
votes
Accepted
Why are the dotted i (І/і) and yi (Ї/ї) from Ukrainian not present in Russian?
The Russian alphabet had both і and ї in the past, but they became obsolete.
"Изменялись также правила относительно числа точек над І: Пётр отменил было их; затем было предписано ставить по две ...
- 4,339
6
votes
How come the Russian cognate for the Czech word "čerstvý" (fresh) means entirely the opposite thing (stale)?
The original meaning of the proto-Slavic etymon seems to have been "robust, sturdy".
It had later shifted its meaning to "hard" in Russian and to "good, wholesome" in Czech.
- 56k
5
votes
Why do stress patterns often match between cognates in Russian and Ukrainian?
The history of the modern Russian language is remarkable in that it appeared from convergence of two distinct dialects in about equal parts (Nothern and South-Eastern; only the latter you might call '...
- 3,098
5
votes
Accepted
Why do stress patterns often match between cognates in Russian and Ukrainian?
Your claim is just wrong. While Russian and Ukrainian are very closely related indeed (so this is an answer to your question - why the majority of words that share same origin share same stress ...
- 38k
3
votes
Accepted
Why the distinction between animate/inanimate appears in masculine accusative but only in feminine plural?
Animacy as a syntactic feature appeared in Proto-Slavic not long before its split, and it took some time for it to spread to all semantically animate nouns (meaning nouns answering the question "...
- 56k
3
votes
How come the Russian cognate for the Czech word "čerstvý" (fresh) means entirely the opposite thing (stale)?
Иногда одно и то же слово, встречаясь в двух языках, имеет в них значение не то что «несходное», а скорее прямо противоположное. Вот пример: мы говорим «черствый» о хлебе, который уже остыл и засох; «...
- 134
3
votes
Why are the dotted i (І/і) and yi (Ї/ї) from Ukrainian not present in Russian?
Russian language has [йе] е [йо] ё [йу] ю and [йа] я, but it doesn't have a dedicated letter for [йи] since it is usually covered by ьи or similar. So naturally there's no ї and it had to be invented ...
- 2,786
2
votes
Why are the dotted i (І/і) and yi (Ї/ї) from Ukrainian not present in Russian?
Russian vowels come in pairs: а/я, о/ё, у/ю, ы/и, э/е.
The first three pairs are "good" ones. The second one in each pair is a front vowel (pronounced with the tongue closer to the front of the mouth ...
- 56k
2
votes
Modern letters in Church Slavonic
are ꙗ and ѧ likewise obsolete in terms of writing Church Slavonic? No current texts I can find online (e.g. the Elizabeth Bible) avoid Я.
You've probably found some sort of transcript into the modern ...
- 15.2k
2
votes
Modern letters in Church Slavonic
Church Slavonic orthography is quite complicated: there are different letters used to distinshuish between some homonyms, several types of stresses, commonly used abbreviations and all kind of other ...
- 56k
1
vote
Modern letters in Church Slavonic
"Appropriate" is a term that is heavily context-dependent. In linguistics text thanks to existence of Unicode (and even before it) the original Church Slavonic typeset is usually used. Exactly like ...
- 38k
1
vote
What is the proper отчество for Cтанислау?
Станислау (Stanislaw) is the Byelorussian spelling of Станислав. So, in Russian we get Станиславович/Станиславовна. Now, actually, please correct me if I’m wrong because I’m Uzbek, and really don’t ...
- 194
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible