A linguistic mystery yields clues in Russian
Friday, February 7, 2014 - 08:00
in Astronomy & Space
When it comes to numbers, Russian grammar has a bewildering thicket of rules. A singular noun such as "table" ("stol" in Russian), used as the subject of a sentence, takes a special "case form" called the nominative singular. When used with numbers five and above, table takes a different form called the genitive plural ("pjat' stolov"). And with numbers from two to four, it takes still a different form, the genitive singular ("dva stola").