Russ. zajti : vojti

[Steven Young]

Colleagues,

In dealing with students who were born in the former Soviet Union and are
native speakers of Russian (we have quite a few on campus), I've long
observed usages which are non-normative but seem to have become de-facto
norms in everyday spoken Russian, like odet' [sviter] rather than nadet',
or ezhaj / ed' as the imperfective imperative of exat' (I won't bring up
kushat' : est' again!).  I was reminded of the whole question of norms in
reading in a student essay "on zashol v komnatu"--for many native-speaker
students I've dealt with, 'zajti' seems to have almost replaced 'vojti' in
the context of going into a room.  I remember one student trying to draw a
slight semantic distinction for me, though I couldn't follow her
intuitions.  Any comments?

Steve Young.

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