polceny

[Ralph Cleminson]

On Tue, 27 Jan 1998  Michael Yadroff <myadroff at indiana.edu>
wrote:

>>
> Today in a certain E-R dictionary I encountered  a word
> _polceny_ (as a translation of E. _half-price_) with
> grammatical info (noun, feminine). This is evidently
> incorrect.

It all depends on how you define gender, I suppose.  Modern Russian
has now reached the stage where (except for nouns in -a or -ja
denoting male persons) gender is identified with declensional type.
Since, for example, polchashki has Gsg poluchashki, Dsg poluchashke
etc., and polchasa has Gsg poluchasa, Dsg poluchasu etc., then the
former can be regarded as belonging to a feminine declensional type
and the latter as belonging to a masculine declensional type, and
this considered as meaning that they are respectively feminine and
masculine.

If we deduce gender from agreement, things are more complicated, as
these nouns in the N take neuter singular agreement of verbs and
plural agreement of adjectives and pronouns.  In oblique cases,
however, they take the gender of the declensional type to which they
belong: iz etoj poluchashki.  (One way of resolving this difficulty
has been to propose a suppletive declension with the oblique cases
supplied from a noun *poluchashka unrepresented in the NA, but this
seems rather unconvincing to me.)

In the specific case of polceny, this is slightly obscured by the
fact that it only seems possible to use it in the accusative, but
this would seem to be a semantic rather than a grammatical
constraint.  And in view of the above, if the poor lexicographer was
forced to indicate a gender for it, feminine does not seem an
unreasonable choice.  It certainly isn't "evidently wrong".

Incidentally, I seem to have missed the question about
approximative inversion in Old Russian.  What was it?


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
R.M.Cleminson, M.A., D.Phil.
Dept of Mediaeval Studies, Central European University
Post: H-1245 Budapest 5, P.O.B.1082
Phone: +361 327 3024   Fax: +361 327 3055
http://www.ceu.hu/medstud/ralph.htm