declension of "sto"

[Alina Israeli]

>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


I think we are constantly gatting embroiled in the issue of "norm". I
believe Ickovich years ago addressed the problem: that is there are two
norms as far as Russian is concerned: the prescribed norm, and the norm for
each dialect. I believe Robert Orr was asking about the first one, when
asking about "sto", so did Emily Tall asking "na russkom jazyke" etc.

The issue of two norms, I think, is strange for Americans, because they
don't have the Academy, that would worry about the spelling, prononciation,
verbal government, and, of course, the stress. But other European countries
have Academic Grammars and Academic dictionaries, and in general hold
academicians in high esteem, some even call them "immortals".

The other reason, I believe, Americans in general have a hard time with the
Russian idea of the "norm", is because, the US was settled, and the
language spread in a certain way, rather than evolve, and endured the fight
between the dialects as to which should be concidered the unifying one. All
attempts to concider the Mid-Western the "best" dialect slowly vanished,
besides, its difference even from the Brooklyn dialect is nothing compared
to dzjakan'e, cokan'e or chokan'e. Not to mention a whole different
vocabulary (Northern Russian dialect, for ex.).

Italians are more likely to understand, given the attitude to the dialects
from the standartization point of view. And I would think, that given
German linguistic history, German late unification (similar to Italian) and
the multitude of the dialects, and the famous "high German" (hoch Deutch,
am I right?), the issue of two different types of norm would be
self-evident.

Alina