Talk:лесостепь

Is there really a 7th case in Russian language now?

Some of the Old Russian cases have merged, leaving Modern Russian with only six cases as a general rule ... however, there are still may vestiges of the old declensions, and not infrequently there is a distinct locative form. For example: о лесе / в лесу ... о поле / на полу ... о мосте / на мосту ... о доме / на дому ... о льде / на льду ... о береге / на берегу. Besides these, there are hundreds of words where the accent shifts to a different syllable between the prepositional case (о двЕри) and the old locative (в дверИ).

So, while the number of cases in Russian has been set at six, purely by convention, in fact many words enjoy more than six. There are a very few instances of the vocative case (боже, господи), and there are numerous words that have alternate forms (especially in the genitive, such as года / году) but there are also a number of words with separate locative forms and even some words with separate partitive forms (such as чая / чаю)... the so-called partitive-genitive (родительный разделительный). Therefore, while native speakers may count only six cases ... foreigners who are learning Russian soon learn that there are often more than six. —Stephen 14:58, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Well... Good point... However For someone studing Russian and learning by heart that there are six cases stumbling upon the seventh might be to much of a surprise. It probably make sence to have thouse situations mention outside the standard declension table or at least marked as out of ordinary situation. FarEast

Yes, it would be helpful to point out the difficulties and irregularities of each word outside of the table, along with some examples... and sometimes I have done this (e.g., январь, etc.). It requires more work to do it that way, however, and I don’t think that adding the occasional vocative case, partitive case, or locative case is very confusing to students of the language. This is how the matter was presented to me many years ago as I learned Russian at a government спецшкола, and I always thought that it made good sense.

So, I believe that the best approach is to include an extra case in the table where appropriate, and also to provide some examples and/or explanation outside of the table. However, I have my hands full with many incomplete Cyrillic pages at the moment and I simply haven’t the time to do everything that I would like to do on every page.

You are right about лесостепь ... when I was working on the table, I was thinking only of the last part, степь, and there I pronounce it "в степИ"... but лесостепь is regular ("в лесостЕпи"). It’s common in both English and Russian that compound words are regular even when their parts are not. —Stephen 09:20, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

All right, got it :) And if you need any help from native speaker don't hesitate to ask. If it is something I don't know I can always ask my wife who is a Russian language philologist. By the way they don't say от января до декабря in Russia. The proper form is с января по декабрь. FarEast