kakoj est' + li

[John Dunn]

I am, as ever, grateful to Alina Israeli for her comments.  As it happens, a colleague and I have recently written and published a Russian grammar, and during work on this I made three alarming discoveries:

1) Russian has a frighteningly large amount of grammar;
2) A surprisingly large amount of this grammar remains a mystery to me, even after I spent over 40 years of my life supposedly studying the language;
3) A surprisingly large amount of this grammar has not been properly described.

The various -то, -нибудь [-to, -nibud'] etc. forms undoubtedly belong to category 3.  Over the years I have, however, formed two conclusions, both of which are certainly open to challenge:

a) Contrary to what we tell our students, the meanings of the different forms are not clearly distinguished, but overlap, so that there are a number of situations where two forms are possible;
b) There is a tendency for -то [-to] to expand its domain at the expense of -нибудь [-nibud'] and perhaps кое- [koe-].

On that basis it might be possible to interpret the poem as reflecting an older form of the language (as poems often do), but this is not exactly supported  either by Alina Israeli's intuition or by the Google results.  So yes, we do need a dissertation (or better, several).

John Dunn.

-----Original Message-----
From: Alina Israeli <aisrael at AMERICAN.EDU>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 11:22:33 -0400
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] kakoj est' + li

John Dunn raises an interesting question which should be investigated: 
we obviously do not expect anything be replace by anything (for ex. stol 
by sobaka), so we have some kind of grammatical metonymy. This metonymy 
should be studied.

Here's an example of a poem I came across last night:

Не жди письма, любезная Матрена,
Писать я письма, знаешь, не мастак.
Идет война, осталось два патрона,
Ты извини, коль что–нибудь не так. (Ю. Беломлинская)

Ne zhdi pis'ma, ljubeznaja Matrena,
Pisat' ja pis'ma, znaesh', ne mastak.
Idet vojna, ostalos' dva patrona,
Ty izvini, kol' chto-nibud' ne tak.

On another day of the week I would have read it and moved on. But since 
I was reading it yesterday, after the ungrammaticality in poetry 
discussion the -nibud' immediately stuck out as a sore thumb. Not that 
it is totally incorrect, I could even give a grammatical reasoning why 
it is correct, but it is not usually said in this context.

Let's use Google again:

7,960 for "извини если что не так"
1,280 for "извини если что‒то не так"
2 for "извини если что‒нибудь не так"

The numbers speak for themselves.

So in this case -nibud' replaced  ø or -to, but they all are members of 
a close knit group of particles.

This grammatical metonymy would be an excellent topic for a dissertation.

Alina

John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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