imperative?

[Steve Marder]

> 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.

There is a verb сбоить (sboit').

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------