Russian malware communicates by leaving comments in Britney Spears's Instagram account

Generally you don’t employ prepositions in Russians. So “(i) go hospital” is perfectly reasonable. It’s a case driven language. So instead of the prepositions you would use the appropriate case - genitive in this case i think. However my Russian is very poor.

Pet’ (to sing) takes accusative for what is sung and locative for the subject. As the subject is not “in” the song the proposition o (about) is needed. So it’s o traktorakh (about tractors) and not traktoriy (accusative inanimate plural of traktor).
(I’m on a laptop so Russian script isn’t easy, using transliteration.)
You are thinking, I think, of situations such as the use of the instrumental where c + instrumental means “with” while the instrumental without the preposition has a slightly different connotation - by means of.

Omitting unnecessary pronouns is a different matter. Znayete? Da, znayu.

Pronouns may be needed with the past tense because it doesn’t identify person, only gender and number. It’s all quite logical. (e.g. if I have been talking about what Igor did and what I did, and I just said “сказал” it would be unclear if he said it or I said it, just as in English. So the pronoun is needed. But if I were feminine and said “сказала” it would be clear that it was me and not Igor.

I mention this purely because clarity of language is something I find interesting.

1 Like

It is indeed perfectly logical. But it just reminds me how hard studying it was.

I am sure it’s why the Russians are so good at computer science. Once you’ve learned Russian, C++ is a doddle.
But even Russians get it wrong. Brezhnev had a special person at the Soviet Broadcasting Agency who used tape editing to correct the grammar in his speeches. When Gorbachev refused to do this and spoke live to air, the intellectuals laughed at him for his mistakes, not knowing that every previous Soviet leader had probably been just as bad.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.