declension of "sto"

[Tilman Berger]

Dear colleagues,

I have been following the discussion about "so stami rubljami" for some
time and must say, that I am rather astonished about some comments,
especially from native speakers. Does it really make sense to use terms
like "impossible" or "illiterate" in such a debate?

To my opinion the first question should be: is there anybody who uses forms
like "so stami rubljami" when he/she wants to speak about 100 rubels (not
about hundreds of rubels). If there are such people it would be interesting
to know if they normaly use "razgovornaja rech' " or "prostorechie" or some
kind of dialect. And the third question could then be: is this a tendency
of Russian as a whole or a typical phenomenon of "prostorechie" etc.?

If we really want to find out if "so stami rubljami" is a new
("progressive") tendency in Russian or a dialectism or something else, it
does NOT suffice to ask Russians who have got "vyshshee obrazovanie". It is
rather clear what they will answer (you can look up this in the Russkaja
grammatika as well).

Best wishes

Tilman Berger




Prof. Dr. Tilman Berger
Universit=E4t T=FCbingen
Slavisches Seminar
Wilhelmstr. 50
D-72074 T=FCbingen
Tel. +7071/29-76733

e-mail: tberger at uni-tuebingen.de