Google and shoes
Alina Israeli
aisrael at AMERICAN.EDU
Mon Oct 18 15:00:55 UTC 2010
Right, except this example (А ты в Гугле смотрел?) does not speify the
gender.
We still haven't figured out the gender of shoes in Russian (I am not
planning to open a can of worms here), simply because we usually use
them in plural.
So we have authors whose Russian is undoubtedly good, Dina Rubina,
confuse it:
Хоп! – туфля полетела вверх, каблуком чуть не сбив отцовский бокал на
столе. (Почерк Леонардо) http://bookz.ru/authors/rubina-dina/po4erk-l_557/page-4-po4erk-l_557.html
Не торопясь, он уложил любимый мягкий чемодан из оливковой кожи,
небольшой, но приемистый, как солдатская котомка: его утрамбуешь до
отказа, по самое, как говорил дядя Сёма, не могу, - глядь, а второй
туфель все же влез. (Белая голубка Кордовы) http://www.dinarubina.com/texts/golubka.html
So it should not be surprising that some newer words fluctuate. In
fact we do have changes in gender of some nouns in recent history of
the Russian langauge.
Oct 18, 2010, в 9:32 AM, Elena Ostrovskaya написал(а):
> But the difference is obvious: very few people will
> mention Bangladesh in their daily lives, while something like "А в
> Гугле ты смотрел?" can be heard hundreds of times every day.
>
Alina Israeli
Associate Professor of Russian
LFS, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington DC 20016
(202) 885-2387 fax (202) 885-1076
aisrael at american.edu
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