imperative?

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Richard Robin wrote:

> Well, actually, it's easy to prove: people say things like: Надо
> нажать на «воспроизведение», на «перемотку», etc. Plus, what would be
> the imperative behind сбой?

Well, I never suggested that it would be hard to prove, only that your 
original dataset of masculines and neuters and one abbr. fem. didn't 
prove anything. I'm perfectly happy accepting the fact that Russians do 
use nouns in the nominative singular on such buttons; I was just saying 
that someone who had to fit these into a model with imperatives would 
want to conjure up a verb somehow. And in that case, производить сбой, 
пуск, etc. would be as close as they could come.

It's probably no news to anyone here that Russians (like Germans) can 
use the infinitive on signs of injunction: не курить, etc.

The problem with the imperative model is that Russian is far less happy 
than English animizing machines (as the second person in an imperative 
construction). It's just not something they do. So if we wanted to force 
an imperative construction on them, who would be the actor (the person 
commanded to act)? The machine operator certainly isn't issuing commands 
to himself.

In morphological terms, сбой is from сбить, right? So the imperative 
ought to be сбей! This obviously makes no sense.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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