Quick grammer question - CASES

[Susanna Porte]

On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, UDUT, KENNETH wrote:

>
> Could someone provide a sentence, in English, then in Russian, which
> contains all of the normal cases?  [nominative, genitive, dative,
> accusative, instrumental, and prepositional/locative]
>
> For example, I *think* a sentence which has nominative, dative and
> accusative, might be:
>
> I taught Joe math.
>
> I might have this wrong [and *please* correct me if it is wrong], but in

You have it right.

Here is a slightly-altered sentence borrowed from Michael Heim's
_Contemporary Czech_ (p. 20):

"A friend of our family wrote us a letter about his car with a pen."

My translation:

"Drug nashei sem'i pisal nam pis'mo o svoei mashine ruchkoi."
(nom.)  (gen.)          (dat.) (acc.)  (prep.)      (instr.)

(I must sheepishly admit that I can't remember whether one needs to write
an "s" before the "ruchkoi," but I'm sure someone else will answer this
question soon enough.)

Also, if you haven't already consulted it, Edwina Cruise's _English
Grammar for Students of Russian_ is worth buying.

> I am grateful to everyone here who made it very very clear to me that
> GRAMMER must come first and be mastered as much as is possible,
> otherwise I almost certainly would have put grammer in 2nd place and
> passed over these things until I regretted it later on.

Just one correction, tho', if you don't mind: the correct spelling of the
word is "grammar."

Vsego khoroshego,

Susanna Porte