Gender of Russian loan words

[Vera Beljakova]

I learnt Russian from my parents and grandparents 
Dear Annie, 

I learnt Russian from my parents and grandparents who were taught
from 1896 [home schooling, gymnasia, lyceum, institut, university & Russian school in Berlin)...and in their 19th c. Russian, it was ALWAYS :

ETOT musei
ETA biblioteka
ETOT al'bom.....................

so......... by late 19th c. loan words already had genders.


 

Vera Beljakova
Johannesburg


 ----- Original Message ------
 From:Alexandra Smith
 Sent:Monday, May 11, 2009 08:41
 To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu; 
 Subject:Re: [SEELANGS] Gender of Russian loan words
 


 
 
 
 Dear Annie Burkie, 


There is a very interesting book that touches upon the issue of the 
unstable gender in Russian language as reflected in contemporary 
poetry. It's written by Professor Liudmila Zubova (St Petersburg State 
University)):Современная русская поэзия в контексте истории языка. М., 
изд-во "Новое литературное обозрение" 2000. 
I also like Zubova's article devoted to the issue of gender in 
contemporary poetry: Категория рода и лингвистический эксперимент в 
современной русской поэзии // Проблемы функциональной грамматики: 
Категории морфологии и синтаксиса в высказывании / Ред. А.В. Бондарко, 
С. А. Шубик. СПб., "Наука". 2000. С. 194-210. 
I hope you'll find the above works helpful. 

All best, 
Alexandra 




------------------------------------ 
Alexandra Smith (PhD, University of London) 
Reader in Russian 
Department of European Languages and Cultures 
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures 
The University of Edinburgh 
David Hume Tower 
George Square 
Edinburgh EH8 9JX 
UK 

tel. +44-(0)131-6511381 
fax: +44- (0)131- 650-3604 
e-mail: Alexandra.Smith at ed.ac.uk 


Quoting Annie Burke : 

> Hello Seelangtsy! 
> 
> I've been a seelangs subscriber for some time but only recently came 
> across a question worthy of your collective wisdom. I studied Russian 
> in college and have spent enough time in Russia to speak the language 
> fairly well, and have taken it upon myself to teach a friend of mine. 
> We were going over gender of nouns this afternoon, and read in our 
> Pulkina textbook from the 80s or 90s that loan words are neuter. But 
> then he started asking whether words like музей, библиотека, альбом, 
> etc. are neuter. I thought no, of course not! But when I looked in my 
> dictionary I found that they were! However, a search on rambler.ru 
> says that they are masculine, feminine and masculine, respectively. My 
> suspicion is that two decades ago such words were loan-ey enough to be 
> neuter, but now, especially with globalization gone wild, such words 
> have been sufficiently adopted to take on what seem like more logical 
> genders. 
> 
> Does anybody out there have any more detailed information about this 
> type of gender transition? This seems like a pretty massive change in 
> grammar to happen over the fewer than 15 years that has passed since 
> my dictionary (Katzner) was published! 
> 
> Spasibo bol'shoe, 
> 
> Annie 
> 
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