den' rozhdenija

[anne marie devlin]

Dear All,

Once more we have a wonderful example of a sociolinguistic variable showing the dynamic nature of language!

 I was just wondering if the 'bylo' could be interpreted as a neutral expression as in 'it was' as opposed to a verb where the agreement with the noun has been incorrectly marked.  I would be also interested to know what the members think of 'bylo u menya den' rozhdenija'

AM
 
> Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 23:18:43 -0400
> From: paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] den' rozhdenija
> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
> 
> 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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