Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

[Mista]

I thought everyone knew what a catfish looked like.

I think they are more common, or at least more well known, in the US. I certainly knew what a catfish was when I was living there as an 11 year old, and the reason was that when people went fishing, it was catfish they were fishing for. Apart from that, I know cod and salmon, because those are the ones I would be willing to eat at that age

I just checked wikipedia now to figure out what catfish are called in Norway and if we have them here - turns out they are called "malle" (I may have heard the name before...), we have one species, but they are small, and not something you would be likely to want on the hook if you were fishing.

[Brun Ugle]

I thought everyone knew what a catfish looked like.

I think they are more common, or at least more well known, in the US. I certainly knew what a catfish was when I was living there as an 11 year old, and the reason was that when people went fishing, it was catfish they were fishing for. Apart from that, I know cod and salmon, because those are the ones I would be willing to eat at that age

I just checked wikipedia now to figure out what catfish are called in Norway and if we have them here - turns out they are called "malle" (I may have heard the name before...), we have one species, but they are small, and not something you would be likely to want on the hook if you were fishing.

True, but they also show up in cartoons quite a bit, which is why I had made that assumption.

[Radioclare]

True, but they also show up in cartoons quite a bit, which is why I had made that assumption.

I genuinely had no idea what they looked like! But then I've never been fishing and I'm not big on cartoons. I'm guessing they must be common in Serbia to have made it into the lyrics of a song though!

[Radioclare]

I am tearing my hair out with Russian at the moment. Having spent the past month or so trying to get through a couple of chapters about the genitive, the final straw came this morning when my textbook informed me that after the numbers 2, 3 and 4, while nouns are taking genitive singular endings, adjectives take genitive plural endings, unless the noun is feminine, in which case they might take genitive plural endings or they might take nominative plural endings, depending.

Seriously?!

I mean, it's bad enough that nouns are genitive singular after 2, 3, 4 and genitive plural after 5+. I spent about a year trying to get my head around this in Croatian, and only really got the hang of it properly when I finally found a textbook which explained that 12, 13, 14 are not defined as numbers ending in 2, 3, 4. But the fact that in Russian, an adjective is supposed to be a plural of any sort when paired with a noun that's in the singular is a step too far for me How am I ever supposed to remember that?! There's no sort of logic or common sense to fall back on


Having dropped this bombshell, my textbook went on to say: "The grammar of Russian numerals has other intriguing complications. For details see Lesson 22". I am not sure I'm going to make it to Lesson 22. I am contemplating giving up and just going to St Petersburg on one of those cruises where you don't need a visa and get led around everywhere by an English-speaking guide!

Anyway. Apart from that, things are fine. I have finished work for Christmas (yay!) and I'm using some of my free time to read 'Anđeli i demoni', a Croatian translation of Dan Brown's 'Angels and demons'. I don't know what Dan Brown corresponds to on the CEFR scale, but this is the level at which I can read Croatian comfortably and not have to worry about what words mean. The only thing I've looked up so far in this novel is 'tvar', which means 'matter' (matter as in the sort of stuff the universe is made from).

I did a reading diagnostic test this morning to cheer myself up after my Russian struggles and scored a 3, which is as high as you can get. Obviously it's easy to get high scores in reading. I didn't have the patience to do the listening test today because listening always takes longer than reading, but I will try to make myself do it at some point because it's probably a more realistic assessment of level.

2018-12-18.png

What else? You were due to hear my fourth favourite song from the Bajaga album but in the interests of diversity, here is a new song featuring Dubioza kolektiv. I don't actually like it much and in general I find it annoying when people write English words with Cyrillic characters. But I'd never heard of the band Russkaja before (apparently they are from Austria) and I guess it's an interesting mix of languages...

[Chung]

I am tearing my hair out with Russian at the moment. Having spent the past month or so trying to get through a couple of chapters about the genitive, the final straw came this morning when my textbook informed me that after the numbers 2, 3 and 4, while nouns are taking genitive singular endings, adjectives take genitive plural endings, unless the noun is feminine, in which case they might take genitive plural endings or they might take nominative plural endings, depending.

Seriously?!

I mean, it's bad enough that nouns are genitive singular after 2, 3, 4 and genitive plural after 5+. I spent about a year trying to get my head around this in Croatian, and only really got the hang of it properly when I finally found a textbook which explained that 12, 13, 14 are not defined as numbers ending in 2, 3, 4. But the fact that in Russian, an adjective is supposed to be a plural of any sort when paired with a noun that's in the singular is a step too far for me How am I ever supposed to remember that?! There's no sort of logic or common sense to fall back on


Having dropped this bombshell, my textbook went on to say: "The grammar of Russian numerals has other intriguing complications. For details see Lesson 22". I am not sure I'm going to make it to Lesson 22. I am contemplating giving up and just going to St Petersburg on one of those cruises where you don't need a visa and get led around everywhere by an English-speaking guide!

The intriguing complications of Chapter 22 are things like fractions, "both", large numbers (e.g. 1,000,000), verb concordance with numbers, and collective numerals (cf. dvoje, troje, dvojica, trojica etc. of BCMS/SC). All somewhat advanced stuff, but I think that you can most quickly grasp verb concordance with numbers since the useful rule of thumb is that subjects modified by a cardinal number of 2 or more take a verb in 3rd person singular (3rd person singular (neuter) if the verb is in past tense). The rules for verb concordance with collectives and animate nouns are different, however.

The complications in declining numerals in most Slavonic languages stem from the fact that many Slavs stopped using the dual, and to maintain some semblance of case marking for quantified nouns and adjectives, ended up recycling certain case endings that remained.

The Russian "solution" for dealing with quantities of "2", "3" or "4" makes a mess of things because it mixes the conventions of BCMS/SC on one hand (kind of), and those of Czech, Polish, Slovak or Ukrainian on the other (kind of). Then again, we are talking about Russian: the Slavonic language with massive vowel reduction and fairly unphonemic spelling, not to mention other idiosyncracies compared to other Slavonic languages . I even brought up this complex way of declining numerals in my old log by comparing the phrase "[X] old book(s)" in a few Slavonic languages. I like to think that having a background in a few Slavonic languages before tackling Russian made it a little easier than otherwise to untangle its way of declining numerals. Even so while looking at Wiktionary's entry for два, I've wondered why speakers of Russian settled on such a "solution" to counter the loss of the dual when other Slavs came up with slightly more consistent or "levelled" techniques to deal with the same loss. If the noun modified by 2, 3 or 4 takes plural endings, then so do the applicable adjectives (or in the example of BCMS/SC, quantified nouns and adjectives take (superficially genitive) singular forms after 2, 3 and 4, but (genitive) plural forms at 5 or more). It seems more consistent than the Russian way of letting this noun take a singular ending while the applicable adjectives take a plural one. Complexity for complexity's sake?

Point 10.13 in my copy of "The New Penguin Russian Course" states the following:

...after два, три, четыре, nouns are in the genitive singular (9.5) and any adjectives are in the genitive plural with masculine and neuter nouns and in the nominative plural with feminine ones.

However, it looks like you can make your life a little simpler by declining feminine adjectives modified by 2, 3 or 4 also in genitive plural like their masculine and neuter variants as suggested here...

(b) Adjectives do not agree with the nouns after 2, 3, 4 (22, 53, etc.).

MASC. Два больших (gen. pl.) стола (gen. sing.)

NEUT. Три новых (gen. pl.) здания (gen. sing.)

FEM. Две большие (nom. pl.) комнаты (gen. sing.)

With feminine nouns, the nominative plural of adjectives is preferred. However, the genitive plural is also used:

две больших комнаты "two large rooms"

три рyсских дамы "three Russian ladies"

...and here:

2.10.1 Case usage with numerals

When a cardinal numeral is in the nominative form (including accusatives that are identical to nominatives), the following rules apply:

1 + nominative singular adjective and nominative singular noun
2, 3, 4 + genitive plural adjective and genitive singular noun (Note: If the referent of 2/3/4 is feminine, then the adjective may be nominative plural.)
5-20, 25-30, 35-40, etc. + genitive plural adjective and genitive plural noun

Declining a feminine adjective in nominative plural when quantified by 2, 3 or 4 seems optional rather than mandatory, and barring a native's comment reporting otherwise, I'd satisfy myself with that.

Of course, what we've just talked about applies to instances where the quantified phrase of 2, 3 or 4 is in the nominative. Things are probably a little easier to remember in the other cases since you'd then decline all relevant elements of the phrase in the same case and number.

E.g. две старых книги (N - adjective in genitive plural, noun in genitive singular) but о двух старых книгах (L) and под двумя старыми книгами (I)

In a slightly joking way, I'm reminded of Russian political paranoia and how it extended to some aspects of grammar with declension of numerals becoming unduly complicated such that most outsiders who'd try to figure it out would be tempted to give up studying and never get beyond learning Russian to a basic level. All the better to keep outsiders in the dark about Russia and Russians, I guess.

[Daniel N.]

I mean, it's bad enough that nouns are genitive singular after 2, 3, 4 and genitive plural after 5+. I spent about a year trying to get my head around this in Croatian, and only really got the hang of it properly when I finally found a textbook which explained that 12, 13, 14 are not defined as numbers ending in 2, 3, 4. But the fact that in Russian, an adjective is supposed to be a plural of any sort when paired with a noun that's in the singular is a step too far for me How am I ever supposed to remember that?! There's no sort of logic or common sense to fall back on

It's always best to think about adjectives and nouns with numbers 2-4 as having special forms. However, any textbook should explain that ending in dva means ending with dva in speech, and 12 doesn't end in dva. Arabic/Indian way of writing numbers is much younger than Slavic languages anyway.

The only thing I've looked up so far in this novel is 'tvar', which means 'matter' (matter as in the sort of stuff the universe is made from).

It's quite abstract, and as kind of expected from such short & opaque abstract nouns, feminine.

The Russian "solution" for dealing with quantities of "2", "3" or "4" makes a mess of things because it mixes the conventions of BCMS/SC on one hand (kind of), and those of Czech, Polish, Slovak or Ukrainian on the other (kind of). Then again, we are talking about Russian: the Slavonic language with massive vowel reduction and fairly unphonemic spelling, not to mention other idiosyncracies compared to other Slavonic languages . [...] (or in the example of BCMS/SC, quantified nouns and adjectives take (superficially genitive) singular forms after 2, 3 and 4

Adjectives after 2,3,4,both don't have genitive singular forms (masculine genitive singular would be -og/-eg) and nouns appear to have G sg. forms only because we normally don't mark stress and vowel length.

However, it's interesting there are dialects in Croatia which handle counting in a different way, and of course, there are all kinds of interesting stuff in Slovenia.

[Chung]

I mean, it's bad enough that nouns are genitive singular after 2, 3, 4 and genitive plural after 5+. I spent about a year trying to get my head around this in Croatian, and only really got the hang of it properly when I finally found a textbook which explained that 12, 13, 14 are not defined as numbers ending in 2, 3, 4. But the fact that in Russian, an adjective is supposed to be a plural of any sort when paired with a noun that's in the singular is a step too far for me How am I ever supposed to remember that?! There's no sort of logic or common sense to fall back on

It's always best to think about adjectives and nouns with numbers 2-4 as having special forms. However, any textbook should explain that ending in dva means ending with dva in speech, and 12 doesn't end in dva. Arabic/Indian way of writing numbers is much younger than Slavic languages anyway.

The only thing I've looked up so far in this novel is 'tvar', which means 'matter' (matter as in the sort of stuff the universe is made from).

It's quite abstract, and as kind of expected from such short & opaque abstract nouns, feminine.

The Russian "solution" for dealing with quantities of "2", "3" or "4" makes a mess of things because it mixes the conventions of BCMS/SC on one hand (kind of), and those of Czech, Polish, Slovak or Ukrainian on the other (kind of). Then again, we are talking about Russian: the Slavonic language with massive vowel reduction and fairly unphonemic spelling, not to mention other idiosyncracies compared to other Slavonic languages . [...] (or in the example of BCMS/SC, quantified nouns and adjectives take (superficially genitive) singular forms after 2, 3 and 4

Adjectives after 2,3,4,both don't have genitive singular forms (masculine genitive singular would be -og/-eg) and nouns appear to have G sg. forms only because we normally don't mark stress and vowel length.

Dang, but you're right about the only partial visual merger of the genitive singular as it's clearest in nouns. Adjectives take paucal endings rather than adjectival ones. I admit that I rarely use the term "paucal" and it makes things sound more complex than they are. In any case, I, like Clare, find the Russian way of handling the loss of the dual needlessly complicated by recycling synchronically plural endings for adjectives, and then synchronically singular ones for nouns. Why distinguish the parts of speech even more? (especially when other Slavs didn't go that way). In BCMS/SC it's consistent by basically using superficially singular endings for anything 2-4 (cardinal) and then plural for 5 (cardinal) or more. Western Slavonic recycles nominative plurals for 2-4, and then genitive plurals for 5 (cardinal) or more.

However, it's interesting there are dialects in Croatia which handle counting in a different way, and of course, there are all kinds of interesting stuff in Slovenia.

It certainly helps that in Slovenia, and rural Saxony (i.e. the Sorbs) those sticks-in-the-mud did a better job than the others in retaining the dual, and so avoided many of the headaches experienced by the others as they rejigged their declensions by repurposing some singular or plural endings.

I've read about some Chakavian dialects with weird case endings to make up for the loss of the dual, and which go against the grain of the Shtokavian standard.

[Daniel N.]

In any case, I, like Clare, find the Russian way of handling the loss of the dual needlessly complicated by recycling synchronically plural endings for adjectives, and then synchronically singular ones for nouns. Why distinguish the parts of speech even more?

It certainly helps that in Slovenia, and rural Saxony (i.e. the Sorbs) those sticks-in-the-mud did a better job than the others in retaining the dual, and so avoided many of the headaches experienced by the others as they rejigged their declensions by repurposing some singular or plural endings.

I've read about some Chakavian dialects with weird case endings to make up for the loss of the dual, and which go against the grain of the Shtokavian standard.

Not all dialects in Slovenia conserve the dual, and some conserve it only in verbs, and so on. Slovene standard is intentionally archaic and conservative (as central dialects in Slovenia generally are). Some Čakavian dialects behave like northern languages (i.e. nom. plural with numbers 2-4, and similar stuff).

Everything in Slavic languages is actually needlessly complicated. As we know from English and Mandarin, a language can function perfectly without case endings, and even without verb endings. Even if you want to have cases, it can be argued that you need at most 3 cases to keep the general Indo-European structure (nom, acc, dat/loc), and all nouns and adjectives could have exactly the same endings.

[IronMike]

I figured you were at least a 3 in hrvatski, so nice to see the DLI agrees with me. Congrats!

As for Russian, just swallow your endings, like Russians do. Don't worry, be happy!

[Radioclare]

Thank you everyone for the advice and information

I am feeling a little bit more positive about Russian now, having moved on to the next chapter of my textbook which deals with the comparatively easy topics of the past tense and reflexive verbs.

I don't normally mind learning case endings, but the concept that nouns and adjectives wouldn't agree rather blew my mind!

I eventually worked up the enthusiasm to take the diagnostic test for Croatian/Serbian listening and came out lower than reading, which was what I expected. It took me ages and I found the content way harder than the reading! A lot of the time it felt like my problem wasn't that I couldn't hear the words, but that my vocabulary wasn't extensive enough to know what they meant. Definitely harder subject matter than in a telenovela anyway Perhaps I need a goal for 2019 to work on expanding my vocabulary.

2018-12-21.png

It's nearly Christmas and I'm going to spend most of the rest of 2018 in a place with no Wi-Fi, so I'm just planning to do one final end of year post for this log and then create a new one for 2019