Soft-n adjectives in Russian

[Richard Robin]

*Hello, SEELANGS linguists!

This is pure curiosity — probably something they taught me in grad school
when I wasn’t paying attention. With the exception of последний and синий,
all of the soft-н adjectives that I can think of are either are formed from
basic spacial words (верхний, средний, нижний, передний, задний, дальний,
ближний) and from the temporal adverbs formed from instrumentals — like
утренний and летний. But why? It’s rather rare in Russian (and I assume in
the other Slavic languages) for purely semantic categories to influence
morphology. Why does it appear to be happening here? And if semantics is
the motivating factor, then how to we explain синий? (I suppose последний
could be viewed spacially.) Any ideas?*

-- 
Richard M. Robin, Ph.D.
Director Russian Language Program
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
202-994-7081
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Russkiy tekst v UTF-8


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