4 ms·
>You add +I accusative suffix to [imply definiteness] Very interesting! In Russian, the accusative suffix would play exactly the opposite role. While there's n
by romwell 9y ago
>You add +I accusative suffix to [imply definiteness]
Very interesting! In Russian, the accusative suffix would play exactly the opposite role. While there's no real way to say the beer without additional context, you can say:
поставь пиво в холодильник / put the beer in the fridge
поставь пива в холодильник / put SOME beer into the fridge
- cema 9y agoI think "пива" is the partitive case, though.
- romwell 9y agoThat's exactly it! [1] I'm a native speaker, and I wasn't even aware of partitive case. They never taught us about it, even though a mind-numbing amount of time was spent cramming the name of the usual six cases into our heads. I only got more interested in linguistics after moving to the US, and, sadly, only took one class in college on it. Thanks for noticing this, I just learned something! As a side note, I also mixed up genitive and accusative cases. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian
- cema 9y agoI think the definitive and most authoritative review of the Russian grammatical cases was done by Zaliznyak: http://inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/2002_Zalizniak_RIS_i_statji.pdf http://inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/2002_Zalizniak_RIS_i_sta..., in Russian, pages 36-55. Fascinating reading.
- amaccuish 9y agoпива (as partitive gen.) here sounds really weird to me, like you're pouring it out of a can into something else, and putting that in the fridge. If it's a can you can emphasise it with a number e.g. я поставил одну банку пива в холодильник :) not a native speaker, just living and studying russian in moscow
- pandaman 9y agoThe partitive here is to express that the speaker is not specifying in what form or shape the beer in the fridge should appear. For a native speaker it sounds like you are talking about some quantity of beer but omitted the quantity so it's literally just some unspecified quantity of beer.
- amaccuish 9y agoSo you would say that though? Like I've just never heard my хозяйка квартиры say that is all. I hear it often in things like "would you like some tea/beer?" etc or "i'm going to buy some tea/beer" but never like that. My impression was that outside of those contexts it's not popular. Mind sharing some examples? Would be really useful! :)
- pandaman 9y agoYou probably would never hear somebody saying "Поставь пива в холодильник." since, while a correct sentence, it would need some rare circumstances to be said. Поставь here is much more concrete than "put", it's more like "place" and I could imagine saying this only if I had been managing the fridge at some party and noticed it's running out of beer so I requested somebody to add more beer there. Much more common would be "Принеси/достань/возьми пива из холодильника" (get some beer from the fridge).
- romwell 9y ago>You probably would never hear somebody saying "Поставь пива в холодильник." since, while a correct sentence, it would need some rare circumstances to be said. [...] I could imagine saying this only if I had been managing the fridge at some party and noticed it's running out of beer Yup, pretty much that. Or like that one time when we went binge-shopping on craft beers, but there was only enough space in the fridge for a couple of bottles; so that was a normal request about an hour before we were to watch a movie. Which is pretty much the exact situation you described :)
- 9y ago