Сочи

[Margarita Orlova]

Frans Suasso wrote:

> I googled with the following results:
>
> Сочи    almost 12 million hits
> Сочей  47  000  hits
> Сочям 723 hits.   (For Сочам there are 17 000 hits, but most do not seem to
> refer to the city)
> Сочями 140 hits Сочами  11 700 hits,. not all refer to the city
> Сочях 8 300 hits and  Сочах 267 000 hits.
>
> Conclusion: ?????


A conclusion: 1) people love to make jokes and speak "Albanian",
especially in blogs and such.
2)  People who speak dialects instead of standard Russian tend to
treat the unknown city names according to their endings in Nominative.
3) Eventually, this tendency can change the morphology of many toponymies.

There is an interesting case of the Russian name of Almaty in
Kazakhstan. In 1920-s and 1930-s a not-very-literate part of the
Russian population considered the name Plural and declinable. My
grandmother continued to say "у нас в Алматах" until her death in 1992
(in spite of the fact that officially the city was renamed by Russian
officials into Alma-Ata, feminine).

After Perestrojka, the city got back its original Kazakh name of
Almaty. For a while the name stayed indeclinable, evidently, because
it sounded foreign to the Russian. But today I have googled "в
Алматах" with 9700 hits! Though "в алматы'' (sorry, it is both Acc.
and Prep.) still got about 1,880,000 results.

One more conclusion: the more you decline, the more real (rustic)
Russian you sound (a pun intended:)

Margarita Orlova

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