The inevitable ...

[Stuart Goldberg]

'Zhenit'sia na loshadi' pushes no linguistic boundaries, since the
animal is feminine.  In children's stories and fairy tales animals marry
all the time and their gender identity is determined by grammatical
gender.  In order to maintain all of the 'piquantness' of the original
(I'm assuming, since I don't know SCB), one would have to say --
'zhenit'sia na kone' (which sounds to me more like a plan for the
ceremony than a reference to the bride).  Cf. this headline from the
gossip section of Novye izvestiia -- Элтон Джон снова хочет жениться: на
друге (Elton Dzhon snova khochet zhenit'sia... na druge).

Stuart Goldberg




-----Original Message-----
From: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list
[mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of Jules Levin
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 10:04 PM
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] The inevitable ...

At 05:59 AM 3/23/2005, you wrote:
>If we can safely extrapolate from Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian to
>Russian, the answer is that the choice of verb depends on who
>the subject is, not who the other participant is. Long ago I saw
>a funny story about a cowboy who wanted to marry his horse:
>z^elio se oz^eniti konjem. In Russian that would presumably
>be: on xotel zhenit'sja na loshadi.
>--
>Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics

As always with Russia, it comes down to KTO KOGO...
Jules Levin 

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