# The post office is on that street



## Cerinwen

Hello,

I have quite a simple sentence I want to say in Russian -

'The post office is on that street'

What I mean by 'on' is that the post office is along that street, meaning the person should walk along that street to find it. 

 At first, I thought I might need to use prepositional, but then according to a website I found there's another set or irregular prepositional endings used with the preposition на, or that I should use accusative case with it.  

Here's is what I read on the website -



> _Irregular: it has the ending у. We use it ONLY when meaning "location" (with prepositions в/на):
> Моя книга была в саду = My book was in the garden.
> _




Then I read that I should use  'у' instead, because this would make more sense in this context as the post office is on the side of the road, not on the road itself!

Now I'm a bit confused!


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## Maroseika

In this case none of the prepositions is applicable: Почта дальше по улице.
На улице would mean that the post office is not inside, but outside the building or whatever.

As for the irregularity, it's quite another thing. Some nouns have 2 endings in Prepostional case, for example саде and саду: 
Книга в саду (location) but Мы говорим о саде.
Another examples: лес, берег, бег... As you can see, all of them are Masculine, so улица is not among them. In prepositional it is always (на) улице.
And of course, it is not any kind of irregularity, just special Case, so called Locative Case. In modern Russian it is not as active as before and remained only for a lomited list of nouns.


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## Saluton

*Почта (находится) на той улице.*
The paragraph you quoted is about the ending *-у*, not the preposition *у*, which means "next to": *у того здания* - next to that building. "У той улицы" doesn't make sense.
The preposition *на* is used with the accusative to indicate a direction: *на ту улицу* - to that street, and with the prepositional to indicate a location: *на той улице* - on that street.



Maroseika said:


> In this case none of the prepositions is applicable: Почта дальше по улице.


Почта дальше по улице means "the post office is further down the street." Cerinwen's sentence is different.


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## Maroseika

Saluton said:


> Почта дальше по улице means "the post office is further down the street." Cerinwen's sentence is different.



Why different? "What I mean by 'on' is that the post office is along that street, meaning the person should walk along that street to find it".
By the way Cerinwen did not ask anything about preposition у, she asked about prepostional ending -у.


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## Saluton

The topic was originally something like "prepositional endings with у or на". I won't go into the difference between почта на той улице and почта дальше по улице as it should be clear without explanations.


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## Ben Jamin

What is a "prepositional ending"?


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## Maroseika

Ben Jamin said:


> What is a "prepositional ending"?



Endings in the Prepositional Case: в лес-у, о лес-е.


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## Ben Jamin

Maroseika said:


> Endings in the Prepositional Case: в лес-у, о лес-е.



Thank you!
By the way, I didn't recognize the English term Prepositional Case, I was more accustomed to Locative case.


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## Maroseika

Ben Jamin said:


> Thank you!
> By the way, I didn't recognize the English term Prepositional Case, I was more accustomed to Locative case.


As you can see, "Locative" is not very good term when applied to Russian предложный падеж, as properly locative function can be observed only with some nouns.


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## Ёж!

Maroseika said:


> As you can see, "Locative" is not very good term when applied to Russian предложный падеж, as properly locative function can be observed only with some nouns.


Namely locative ones * ! 

* I mean every noun that names a location in space, like «лес», «город», «дом». When a noun names an abstract concept, its prepositional has to refer to a 'logical' location 'near' or 'inside' that concept, rather than to any physical location in the 'proper' sense of the word.


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## Ben Jamin

Maroseika said:


> As you can see, "Locative" is not very good term when applied to Russian предложный падеж, as properly locative function can be observed only with some nouns.



But there are nouns that have TWO locative forms, like *лес*. 
By the way, both in Polish and Czech the locative i used with many different prepositons, mostly when "speaking about something". Even the standard questions helping learners to remember what the declension case is about refer to the latter use, not actually to the locative function (*about *whom/what: *o* kim/czym  // _*o* kom/čem?), _but the name_ Locative _is retained.


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## Ben Jamin

Maroseika said:


> As you can see, "Locative" is not very good term when applied to Russian предложный падеж, as properly locative function can be observed *only with some nouns*.



It is interesting! Does it mean that most nouns take other cases when speaking about location?
For example, if you want to say "Зто находится на/в/при/у ...", which nouns would take other cases than предложный падеж?
Could you give some examples? And what cases are they?


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## Ben Jamin

Ёж! said:


> Well, the meaning of the preposition 'about' is locative: see the meanings 'near or close to (in space or time)', and 'nearby' in the Collins dictionary. Less so with the preposition «о», that in (modern) Russian does not possess the strictly locative meaning.


In Polish "o" has nothing to do with location, it is an analogue of Russian "об", and is used mostly when speaking "about" something. I suppose the same is in Czech. 
It also can be used when speaking about having a property, and then it means "with". 
The locative meaning of English *about *has no application here.


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## Maroseika

Ben Jamin said:


> Does it mean that most nouns take other cases when speaking about location?
> For example, if you want to say "Зто находится на/в/при/у ...", which nouns would take other cases than предложный падеж?
> Could you give some examples? And what cases are they?




No, this means that in Prepositional Case most nouns have one the same ending in all cases, and only some nouns have different endings depending on whether they are used in proper Locative sense or not:
В лесу and о лесе.

But some nouns have two endings in proper Locative, forms on -е usually being more bookish:
в аду and в аде, в бреду and в бреде, в цеху and в цехе, на мысу and на мысе, на шелку and на шелке, etc.


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## Ёж!

Maroseika said:


> No, this means that in Prepositional Case most nouns have one the same ending in all cases, and only some nouns have different endings depending on whether they are used in proper Locative sense or not:
> В лесу and о лесе.


But: «в огороде», «в кузове», «в городе», «в доме», «на помосте» (yet: «на мосту»), «на кресте», «на телевизоре» («ваза стоит на телевизоре»), «на столбике» (but: «на столбу»/«на столбе»), «на канате», «на столе» (the preposition «у» always takes the Genitive, and «при» is rather logical than spatial: «при лесе»).


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## Cerinwen

Actually, I was referring to the preposition 'y'.  I realise that I should have made myself clearer.  I started off reading different things in different places which led me further down the rabbit hole, as they say!

I realise that there is some kind of locative case in Russian, but it gradually got used less and less.  I think the prepositional case is more common, hence why my Russian grammar book doesn't talk about a locative case.  

Yes Saluton, I suppose my sentence is a bit different than the sentence suggested by Maroseika.  Your suggestion matches my sentence the most I think.

However, in this instance, both your suggestions are welcome, and I can see why Maroseika made her suggestion.  I would be able to use Maroseika's suggestion with customers as well - it's just a different way of communicating a similar message.


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## Ben Jamin

About the existence of Locative in Russian:

I think that the Russian grammaticians have taken a quite different approach than those in other Slavic countries. As far as I know most of the Slavic languages (except Bulgarian) have a case called Locative, even if its function is not any longer to denote a location without use of a preposition (like *дома *in Russian), but the Locative case in those languages is commonly used with at least one preposition to denote localization. It functions also with other prepositions to denote other functions (like telling *about *something  in Polish or Czech (not *being *about a place!)). It seems then, that the function in Russian and in other Slavic languages is very similar, only the name is different.


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## Ёж!

Ben Jamin said:


> As far as I know most of the Slavic languages (except Bulgarian) have a case called Locative, even if its function is not any longer to denote a location without use of a preposition (like *дома *in Russian), but the Locative case in those languages is commonly used with at least one preposition to denote localization.


Quite the same in Russian. Only we have _two_ of them!


> It functions also with other prepositions to denote other functions (like telling *about *something  in Polish or Czech (not *being *about a place!)). It seems then, that the function in Russian and in other Slavic languages is very similar, only the name is different.


The [common] name is «предложный падеж». 'Prepositional case' is a literal translation into English. The name is weird, I agree, and leads to confusions, but it is used… Actually, in Russian, «местный падеж» sounds even weirder: like a 'local case'.  As for English, I think both names can be used equally validly, though I cannot be sure.


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## Saluton

Ёж! said:


> 'Prepositional case' is a literal translation into English. The name is weird


It's not weird. "Предложный падеж" implies the case is always used with a preposition, unlike the other cases that may or may not take one (except the nominative that never does, of course).


Cerinwen said:


> why Maroseika made her suggestion


Oddly enough, Maroseika is male although the name of the street is feminine.


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## Ёж!

Saluton said:


> It's not weird. "Предложный падеж" implies the case is always used with a preposition, unlike the other cases that may or may not take one (except the nominative that never does, of course).


Yes. But it sounds as if this is a case that is used with prepositions, unlike other cases that don't take prepositions, which is wrong; this is because it is so strange that names for many cases (like 'Dative' or 'Instrumental', or, in a way, even 'Genitive') reflect a special property of the sense of the word, while the name 'Prepositional' reflects a not-so-special syntactic property of the word.

After all, _prepositions_ and _cases_ are contrary concepts, in a way, so putting the two words together naturally makes at first wonder at such a beast.


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