gorodishka

R. M. Cleminson rmcleminson at POST.SK
Mon Jun 20 10:32:17 UTC 2011


One should be careful about using Google as evidence for language usage, as the results can be severely distorted by various factors.  Not least among these is the fact that the same text may be found on hundreds of sites, so that a single example may produce hundreds of hits.

Moreover, as Jules Levin has pointed out, there is no clear correlation between gender and declensional type, so that the distribution of Isg. -ом : -ой does not necessarily correspond to the distribution of m:f.  A quick look at the Russian National Corpus reveals examples of both этого городишка and этого городишки (but none of *этой городишки).  Although one would need a far more extensive and detailed analysis before suggesting any conclusions (there may be an undergraduate dissertation in this for someone), this does concur with other evidence from standard Russian that masculine nouns in -o maintain their gender better than their declensional type: proper names are another good example, where one finds such things as Gsg. Шевченки (rare nowadays, but still regular in Solženicyn).
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