The plural declension of башка

[Alina Israeli]

Those are different issues even though they look similar.

On башка all three are probably correct, if this makes sense. The word is Turkic and not fully assimilated, we also have  баш на баш with the same root. So for the standard "elegant" Russian one should say "башка" and not try to make a plural of it. So staying within norms, one would say "У них башка варит", even though each person has a head of his own. Of course the idea of "elegant" Russian in combination with башка is an oxymoron, since башка is colloquial to begin with. So in colloquial language, for example teen's language, башка will have a plural form бóшки: 

Фигасе! – поразился Колобков. – Эти бомжи, что, все поголовно бошками ударились? – Спроси их, – пожала плечами чертовка. (http://www.litmir.net/br/?b=105005&p=10)

Call it substandard or whatever, but it's part of the language. 

We find the same pattern in пальто (non-declinable) — пóльта:

Которые говорят: пальто с прохожего снято - опять-таки мало интересу. Польта пошли дешевенькие. Не рентабельно. (Зощенко. http://www.litmir.net/br/?b=46216)
On the scale of "non-standardness" польта is worse than бошки, and could be used only in jest, mimiking the uneducated style.

But in fact those native speakers don't know the exceptions but they know the rule: the pattern for башка is like for вода and it makes perfect sense.

Now заря and расти are spelling anomalies. Заря could have been easily spelled зоря and pronounced the same way. In fact it should have been spelled зоря, as we get the plural "А зóри здесь тихие". Someone somewhere (historians of the language could tell you better) decided that this word is going to be spelled the Old Church Slavonic way. The same decision was made for расти, because had it been spelled рости it would have made more sense and fewer stupid school rules. The typical school rule is called Проверяется ударением, i.e. you find a stressed form of the word: трава or трова? — трáвы, hence трава. But in case of расти it's the other way around; the school rule says: under stress whatever you hear, but not under stress — the other one. A total contradiction to the main rule, which makes no sense and no one bothers to explain to the poor kiddies why such a nonsense is made into a rule. 

Thus you get расти but рос, and by extension росла. 

Now звонить, which is logically spelled with O, since we have звон has been a cause celebrate of the purists for 200 years. Somehow they picked on this verb back then and don't let it go. There are many verbs where the stress has shifted since the days of Pushkin, and no one suffers because of that. It should have been become он звóнит, like он вáрит, which used to be вари´т (and sometimes still is). 

Плотит on the other hand is the result on analogy, which is one of the engines of change. If there can be мочить-мóчит, молить-мóлит, звонить-звóнит, why not платить-плóтит? Speakers who make mistakes feel the trend (although it doesn't mean that we should always follow them, not until the mistake becomes very common). There is even an occasional дóрит from дарить, which only proves that we may be dealing with a future trend.

Alina Israeli


On Aug 3, 2013, at 6:24 AM, Brian Hayden <bkhayden1990 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> Dear SEELANGers,
> What is the plural declension of башка́? While a quick scan of the dictionaries on dic.academic.ru suggests that the literary standard is башки́ (etc.), I’ve had several Russians insist that the proper form is бо́шки, бо́шек, etc. (Others say that башка doesn’t have a plural declension.)
> Бо́шки seems very strange to me. While, as I’m well aware, the pronunciation of letters often changes due to vowel reduction and stress shift in the declined (or conjugated) forms of a word, I can only think of two other words where a stress shift results in a change in spelling.
> These words are:
> · заря́, in the sense of“reveille, taps”, which becomes зо́рю. The other senses of the word seem to have a more regular declension.
> · Расти́ in the past tense
> And then, though these two words don’t have anything to do with official orthography, they do seem to have something to do with the same а --» о mutation pattern. I’m thinking of the non-normative conjugated forms of звони́ть [but pronounced, naturally, something like «звани́ть» in standard Russian] and плати́ть as пло́тит, зво́нит, etc. (There is a caveat here, though: I’m not sure exactly how a person who would naturally say«Он пло́тит за это» would pronounce the infinitive. Would he say плати́ть or пло́тить?)
> As you’ll probably notice, all of these words are two-syllable, with accent on the second syllable in the nominative or infinitive form, but with stress shifting onto a first syllable “o” in at least some of their declined or conjugated forms.
> These, then, are my three questions: Is there really some sort of pattern here, or am I imagining it? If there is a pattern, then what other words does it affect? And how does this pattern fit in with the other, more familiar vowel reduction patterns (я --» и, о --» а, е --» и, etc.).?
> Sincerely,
>  
> Brian
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