kakoj est' + li

[Alina Israeli]

1.
John Dunn wrote:
>  I find the explanation of poetic licence vaguely unsatisfactory, but the best alternative I can come up with is that this usage is an extension of the rule that requires nominative adjectival complements to be in the short form if they precede the subject.  Can anyone come up with anything better? 

Russian meter forces poets to squeeze things in, English completely lost 
this problem. So in Russian we find wrong stresses, wrong grammatical 
form, -sja lost or added, syllables added, and many other things. That's 
why it is so unfortunate that many dictionary use examples from poetry 
on their face value.


Now let's compare Allochka's maxim with a similar masculine and its 
representation on the web:
18,200 for "я такой какой есть "vs.
880 for "я такой как есть "

Moreover, Allochka has found her match:
147 for "Я такой, как есть, я не буду другим "

One can speculate why 10 thousand women say that and only 147 men. I 
suggest that generations of women already have been taking men as they 
are and there is nothing new here. (This reminds me of the discussion we 
have a few years back of "Xochu takogo kak Putin" who was a wonderful 
alternative to the men as they are.)

And then there is another poetic maxim
112 for "Я такой, как есть, я умею любить."

and yet another:
4 for "Я такой, как есть, к вам опять повернусь. "

I would even venture to say that this masculine attempt to be true to 
oneself is secondary to Allochka's: in her case — ja takaja kakaja est' 
— would have broken the meter, in the male's case it wouldn't:

Ja takoj, kakoj est'
ja ne budu drugim
ja umeju ljubit'
k vam opjat' povernus'

anapaest either way.


2. It's a question of what is known and what the inquiry is about. If we 
know that one of the guys out there is a prorab but don't know what he 
looks like, we are guessing by the draft in his hand:

Eto vY prorab? (—Da, ja).


Lyudmila Grinshpan wrote:
> --- 
>
> Now this question, to fluent Russian speakers: If we devise a similar passage, same structure but in a modern setting, does it come off sounding like a natural exchange?
>
>     (Reporter): Vy li prorab?  -   (Foreman): Ia.
>
> Or would today's interlocutors frame it differently?
>
> "Li" is not often used in colloquial speech. In a modern setting the conversation would probably sound like this:
> (Reporter): Vy prorab?  -   (Foreman): Ia.(or Da.)
>
>   

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