Soft-n adjectives in Russian

Wed Dec 5 21:04:33 UTC 2012

Bob beat me to it.

I think it's fascinating that some of the soft-n suffixed adjectives that don't carry the expected meaning are in fact possessives of animate male people, which have or would have had soft or irregular plurals (сын, муж).  I think I would be tempted to add ихний to this list.

In response to John, all those adjectives in "чий" are actually old Russian forms of the participle/verbal adjective, as opposed to the South Slavic or OCS -щий.

KM

On Dec 5, 2012, at 3:46 PM, Robert Channon wrote:

And if semantics is the motivating factor, then how to we explain синий?

All the other n’ adjectives (other than синий and the possessives in -j-) have the suffix n’, whereas in синий the n’ belongs to the root and there is no suffix.  That’s the way in which синий stands apart from the other n’ adjectives, not because of semantics.  (Morphology to the rescue!)  And then there is a very small number (count ‘em on one hand) of other unsuffixed soft adjectives that have some other consonant at the end of the stem.  Синий really goes with them, and not with the suffixed ones originally mentioned; it’s just an accident that the root of синий ends in n’ that is like the suffix.

The possessives in -j- (бараний, вороний, etc.) stand apart not only because they have a different suffix, but also because they have a different declension, not the "canonical" soft adjective declension.  So they are really “faux soft-n adjectives”.

Also, morphemes carry meaning, so I agree that it’s not surprising that a suffix has a semantic meaning along with a grammatical one (even if only in most if not all words), and there are plenty of instances of that in Russian and other languages.  There are also some instances of the soft-n suffix which don’t seem to carry the “expected” meaning: искренний, сыновний, мужний/замужний, пустопорожний, and a few others.

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Alina Israeli <aisrael at american.edu<mailto:aisrael at american.edu>> wrote:
I would agree with Jules that we find plenty of examples where semantics influence morphology.

Looking at the list of ‒ний adjectives, what strikes me is that the vast majority are possessives: бараний, мужний, олений, тюлений etc. So the adjectives Rich listed could be described as 'pertaining to X': летний — pertaining to лето etc. -j- was a nice possessive suffix (which shows up so beautifully in Ярославль).

As for синий, it would be nice to know what came first, the chicken or the egg, or rather синий or синь. We do have other historic nouns that became numerals, for example. So we very well could have a noun here first. Historian of the language could answer this question.

Alina

On Dec 5, 2012, at 12:49 PM, Jules Levin wrote:

On 12/5/2012 7:19 AM, Richard Robin wrote:
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?

Well, in Lithuanian both types are motivated: -inis, -inas...
No one can truly understand what is going on in Slavic without taking a look at the Baltic languages, especially of course Lithuanian.  But I would dispute your claim that purely semantic categories do not influence morphology.  Note the whole series of possessive adjs derived from animals: volchiy, sobachiy, sviniy, etc.  (One of many examples...)
Jules Levin
Los Angeles

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alina Israeli
Associate Professor of Russian
WLC, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington DC 20016
(202) 885-2387<tel:%28202%29%20885-2387>  fax (202) 885-1076<tel:%28202%29%20885-1076>
aisrael at american.edu<mailto:aisrael at american.edu>

------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 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/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------