Лете ть НА / В са молёте?

[R. M. Cleminson]

----- Originálna správa -----
Odosielateľ: "Alina Israeli" <aisrael at AMERICAN.EDU>
Komu: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Dátum: streda, október 27, 2010 10:56:48
Predmet: Re: [SEELANGS] Лететь НА / В са молёте?

>I understand Tony's bias, but they seem unlikely to me. We reserve  
>instrumental for public transportation, hence ???ехал велосипедом and  
>*скакал/ехал конем are from highly unlikely to impossible.

"Ехать велосипедом" is not impossible, but it is extremely rare: the Russian National Corpus records two examples from a single author.  In general, на + loc. is used for things that you can actually ride.

Indeed, the use of the instr. to denote means of conveyance appears to be comparatively recent, and probably a consequence of the invention of the railways.  In the old days, на + loc. was used to to indicate the means of transport (на коляске, на телеге), and instr. to indicate the style of transport (ехать цугом, ехать четвернею).  Поезд originally mean a procession of conveyances (a caravan, a funeral cortege, whatever), so ехать поездом meant to travel as part of such a group (i.e. in convoy).  The word поезд was then applied to the train of carriages behind a locomotive, so people who travelled in this manner continued to ехать поездом; but then the train came to be seen as a single conveyance, so that it became possible to ехать на поезде, and the two expressions became equivalent (though it seems that, in modern usage, whenever one envisages an actual train, there is a strong pre!
 ference for на + loc.), and the use of instr. to indicate means rather than style was extended to other modern forms of transport.

That is my theory.  Considerably more sifting of factual data is needed before it can be considered proven.  There's a term paper in this for someone.

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