Fascinating language lesson for the day

Nahualli · RealPoor Master of Posts Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 8461

I know most of you find this kind of post lame, but I find it fascinating and that means I want to share it. Smile

It has to do with how certain other people (in this case Russians) view reality and how their language reflects that.

In English we use the verbs "to have" and "to be" to indicate (among other things) existence and possession. "I have a dog" or "Shelly is at school". Conversely we use those same verbs to negate the possession or existence of something.

If you were break up the sentence "I have a dog", I is the subject, have is the transitive verb and dog is the direct object. In Russian this is far too simple, and existence is negated in quite a different way.

All Russian nouns and pronouns decline into 6 cases. There is no equivalent in English, so I cannot compare it well, but we have some remnants of cases from Latin declensions even tho they are inconsistent and never taught as cases or declensions.

national means "of the nation", personal means "of the person". It's an archaic remnant of what in Russian is called the genitive case, the case that denotes possession or relation to another noun, for example "I am a student OF russian" or "that care belongs TO my brother (more accurately : that car is OF my brother's possession)". This is pretty easy to follow, the genitive case is clearly demonstrated here even tho our nouns do not decline to match in case.

The English equivalent of this is any word that uses an apostrophe to denote possession. If it's anything belonging to something or someone else, it will be in the genitive case. In Russian "моя машина" means "my car" which is inherent possession, but saying "the color OF my car (or my car's color)" requires the genitive case and therefore it becomes "цвет моего машины"

I'm rambling but I had to talk about the genitive case because it directly affects how existence (or lack thereof) is perceived in Russian. There is one more case which factors in here, the nominative case. The nominative case is the case of "naming" - essentially a noun's inert, undeclined form. The form of the word that appears in the dictionary and indicates a noun to simply "be". The subject of any sentence in Russian is ALWAYS in the nominative case because it "is". That's the first difference in how reality is perceived.

The second and more cumbersome perception of how reality is perceived is in the lack of. You can't "not have" a dog, because the dog would have to be in the nominative case. Well, there's a an interesting contradiction here.. how can an object that doesn't exist, exist?

The answer : it can't ! Russians describe the lack of something's existence by changing it from the nominative case to the genitive case, effectively negating something's existence by changing the meaning of the sentence to "Dogs are something OF WHICH I have none". If you ask the question "who is not in class today" you cannot use the pronoun "Kto" because "kto" means "who". Well, if someone is NOT in class they can't be referred to the same way as normal people because conceptually they don't exist. The question becomes "Of whom (кого) is there none of in class today?" as opposed to asking who IS in class which is simply enough, "who is in class today?"

Possession of items is also conceptually different. In English you "have" something. In Russian something that you own or have is also thrown into the genitive case because it is "of your general vicinity" or "of you". "у меня есть книга" means literally " there is a book (nominative because it "is") in the ownership OF you" (genitive). By the same token something you do not or will not own you cannot describe in the nominative because it doesn't exist. If you do not have nor will ever have a car you cannot own a "machina" because "machina" is the name for a car - that exists. The way you express this is by saying essentially "of cars, there are none in my immediate ownership or promximity" or "y меня нет машины"

So, there you have it. It's long and probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense or is just plain dumb, but it's a fascinating concept I've found, to find out how other people express the same everyday thoughts we have, just in a different way and with a completely different strain of logic behind it.

-Nah-

Fascinating language lesson for the day

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