den' rozhdenija

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Alina Israeli wrote:

> That older guy saying "звучит дико" is exaggerating a tad. The
> professional PhD holding teacher is wrong.
>
> I think most of us who are saying it correctly, that is "moj den'
> rozhdenija" endured strict drilling from mothers or grand-mothers.
>
> Grammatically it's quite simple: den' rozhdenija is reinterpreted as one
> entity — den'-dozhdenie. A quick search on Google for "день‒рожденье"
> gives About 71,900 results. And this entity should definitely be neuter.
>
> Let's approach the search from the other end: "мое день" gives a
> whopping About 188,000 results. I deliberately left out whatever could
> follow den', it could be spelled differently or it could be "den'
> varen'ja": "мое день варенья" About 17,600 results.
>
> (Of course there are some non-Russian hits mixed in as well, but the
> numbers are so large, that there could hardly be a doubt of its
> popularity.)
>
> Fortunately, "мой день варенья" is a lot more common: About 316,000 results
>
> "мое день рожденья" — About 21,000 results
>
> "мой день рожденья" — About 546,000 results

You can't take Google hit counts at face value -- the numbers claimed on 
page one of their hit lists are wildly inflated over the number of pages 
they actually found.

Set your search settings to 100 hits per page, and then choose page 10. 
In reality, what you get is:

	+"мой день" -- 659 hits (662 without the plus sign)
	+"мое день" -- 643 hits (564 without the plus sign)
	+"день‒рожденье"	 -- 660 hits (with or without the plus sign)
	+"мое день варенья" -- 37 hits (48 without the plus sign)

	+"мой день рожденья" -- 452 hits (451 without the plus sign)
	+"мое день рожденья" -- 41 hits (53 without the plus sign)

	+"мой день рождения" -- 670 hits (664 without the plus sign)
	+"мое день рождения" -- 241 hits (300 without the plus sign)

If there really were tens of thousands of distinct pages for these 
searches, we should always be able to get a list of the first 1,000 (as 
a matter of policy, Google will never list more than 1,000 hits, even if 
it claims there are millions). There aren't.

As you can see above, the masculine forms still enjoy a substantial lead 
over the neuter ones.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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