servera'

[James Augerot]

On Mon, 13 Nov 1995, James West wrote:

> I've been intrigued by this, too - I suppose it's part of the
> assimilation pattern for loanwords of this type in Russian, quite a few
> of which have, or have had, a stressed-a plural, in many cases where the
> word end in -er (e.g. "ofitser" is sometimes given the plural "ofitsera" by
> less educated speakers). Linguists - some comment?
>
>                                                      James West
There are several words in -er (kucher, master, nomer) that seem to have
become the norm with the stressed plural in -a, but it seems to be the
stress pattern and not the particular way a word ends that makes a word a
candidate for this kind of masculine plural. It would seem that it is a
growing class since some handbooks are telling us to avoid plurals like
buxgaltera`, redaktora`, shofera`, while others are allowed marginally:
instruktora`, sektora`, traktora`. I don't know what the last few years
has brought forth, but I would expect that at least for a while the
prescriptive grammarians might become less strident and the language
might well continue to see more of this phenomena of generalization of a
plural that helps differentiate forms within the paradigm and youth from
their seniors.

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      jim augerot slavic department box 353580 uw seattle wa 98195
  e-mail: bigjim at u.washington.edu  fax: 206-543-6009  tel: 206-543-6848
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