# The history of the Russian analytic superlative



## Encolpius

Hello, even Ukrainian prefers using nay- for superlative. It is an interesting part of Russian grammar they say *самый красивый* which reminds me of some Western European patter (le plus beau; the most interesting, etc). My question is: is analytic superlative present in older Russian, Church Slavic or its origin was influenced by French? Thanks.


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## olaszinho

Russian also has the synthetic superlative *красивейший *along with  *самый красивый. *I'm interested in other slavic languages too, don't they possess any analytic superlatives?


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## Karton Realista

olaszinho said:


> I'm interested in other slavic languages too, don't they possess any analytic superlatives?


They existed in Polish and disappeared.
Now we use "najpiękniejszy" or "najbardziej piękny" the "beautifulest" and "the most beautiful" (which is sort of in between, since it uses naj+adv. +adj.).


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## olaszinho

Thank you Karton. Could you please tell me the meaning of "naj", is it a prefix, isn't it? It is probably used in other slavic languages as well...


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## Karton Realista

olaszinho said:


> Thank you Karton. Could you please tell me the meaning of "naj", is it a prefix, isn't it?


Yes, it's limited to adverbs and adjectives, it means "most", "best", etc.
In colloquial Polish it can be a word in and of itself: "Ona ma wszystko naj" (she has everything "best", quite mean and ironic).


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## olaszinho

I don't think so.. I have studied Russian and according to my Russian grammar *красивейший *is the synthtic  superlative, with the same meaning as *самый* *красивый.
более *_*красивый *= *красивее*_
Anyway I'm not so fluent in Russian and I may be wrong*.*


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## Karton Realista

olaszinho said:


> I don't think so.. I have studied Russian and according to my Russian grammar *красивейший *is the synthtic  superlative, with the same meaning as *самый* *красивый.
> более *_*красивый *= *красивее*_
> Anyway I'm not so fluent in Russian and I may be wrong*.*


Sorry, I kinda got confused with this form lacking "наи", you're right.


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## ahvalj

The system of degrees of comparison has many deficiencies in modern Russian: for example, Russian is the only language I know that can't express such a basic concept as "a/the newer something": _более новый_ sounds clumsy and artificial, while _новее_ can't be used attributively.

Concerning the Superlative, the modern language has two unrelated systems: the analytical superlative _самый новый_ and the synthetic one _новейший_ (the latter more often expresses the abundance etc., not the comparison _per se_).

The history of the Superlative has received little attention from the authors of the grammars, so I can only rely on a couple of remarks found here and there. It seems that the Superlative prefix _наи-/naji-_ isn't attested in the vernacular Old East Slavic (so that its presence in modern Ukrainian and Belarusian may suggest that it still hadn't reached Kiev and the more north-eastern areas at that time). _Иванов ВВ · 1990 · Историческая грамматика русского языка:_ 301–302 writes that the Old East Slavic Superlative was only analytical, formed with _вельми, очень, самый._ The synthetic forms with _наи_- or _пре_- did exist, but they seemed to have been confined to the literary language and hence were Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian/Macedonian) in origin.

The forms on _-ейший/-айший_ found in the modern language are originally the Comparatives (and they remain as such in the dialects at the boundary with Belarusian and Ukrainian), which, for the unknown reason, evolved in meaning towards the Superlative. In the standard language they are, however, of a literary, eventually Church Slavonic, origin (e. g. _кратчайший, дражайший _but not _**коротчайший, **дорожайший_), and such a Superlative is absent in the dialects. The prefix _наи_- (which remains bisyllabic in Russian unlike in all other modern languages), is now used with these forms to express the exceeding degree, e. g. _наиновейший_ "the very newest".


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## Encolpius

ahvalj said:


> ...The prefix _наи_- (which remains bisyllabic in Russian unlike in all other modern languages)...



What do you mean ahvalj?  I have known only Slavic languages and Hungarian have something like the prefix наи-.


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## ahvalj

Encolpius said:


> What do you mean ahvalj?  I have known only Slavic languages and Hungarian have something like the prefix наи-.


I meant that among those languages that have this exact prefix (of course, it is present only in Slavic) only Russian preserves its disyllabic pronunciation.


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## Encolpius

1. it exists in Hungarian (leg-), too, formed in the same way from comparative.
2. what do you mean by disyllabic pronunciation? you pronounce it: [nəɪ.] it reminds me of the Czech nej- [neɪ-]


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## ahvalj

Encolpius said:


> 1. it exists in Hungarian (leg-), too, formed in the same way from comparative.


The prefixed Superlative exists in several languages, e. g. also in Latvian: _jaunākais_ "newer" → _visjaunākais_ "newest" ("all-newer"), but we're discussing the descendants of the Slavic _naji-,_ isn't it?



Encolpius said:


> 2. what do you mean by disyllabic pronunciation? you pronounce it: [nəɪ.] it reminds me of the Czech nej- [neɪ-]


I pronounce it _nʌ-i-_ (_ə_ instead of _ʌ_ is a Muscovite pronunciation, but even then the letter _ə_ is misleading since it stands for different sounds in different languages), with two separate vowels, not _naj-/nej-_ with a vowel and a _j_ as speakers of other (Slavic) languages.


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## Encolpius

Does it bear any importance if it is monosyllabic or disyllabic?


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## ahvalj

In the speech yes, _naj-_ would be perceived as a sign of a foreign accent. Otherwise this preservation of _i_ is simply remarkable from the linguistic viewpoint as an archaism of bookish origin.

As a side note, I should explain the situation with this _ə._ I did it several times when I still participated in the Russian forum at WordReference, but the problem of such media is their coverage: the posts are read by 10 people of the 7 000 000 000. So: _ə_ is simply an inconvenient way to write various vague vowels that occur in the world languages. These schwas may have different flavors, e. g. in French they sound like a kind of _ø,_ in Standard German like a kind of _e,_ etc. The Russian vowels transcribed as _ə_ are all of the _a_-type or at least open-mid ones: they never become fronted, so the vowel in the Czech _nej-_ is not similar to the first vowel in the Russian _nai- _except in the most slurred pronunciation. Also, the Russian transcriptions for the foreigners (for the reasons I fail to understand) don't convey the nuances of pronunciation found e. g. in the word-final position: I, like many other Russian speakers, distinguish all the three unstressed endings in _Ваня, Вани_ and _Ване_ (Nom., Gen. and Dat. Sg.: something like _vanʲæ, vanʲı, vanʲe_), whereas the transcription would write all the three forms as _vanʲɪ_ or _vanʲə_.


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## Encolpius

ahvalj said:


> ...they never become fronted, so the vowel in the Czech _nej-_ is not similar to the first vowel in the Russian _nai- _except in the most slurred pronunciation.
> 
> *clear as day*
> 
> ... distinguish all the three unstressed endings in *Ваня, Вани and Ване* (Nom., Gen. and Dat. Sg.: something like _vanʲæ, vanʲı, vanʲe_), whereas the transcription would write all the three forms as _vanʲɪ_ or _vanʲə_.



yes, that's something really difficult to master.


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## Karton Realista

ahvalj said:


> Also, the Russian transcriptions for the foreigners (for the reasons I fail to understand) don't convey the nuances of pronunciation found e. g. in the word-final position: I, like many other Russian speakers, distinguish all the three unstressed endings in _Ваня, Вани_ and _Ване_ (Nom., Gen. and Dat. Sg.: something like _vanʲæ, vanʲı, vanʲe_), whereas the transcription would write all the three forms as _vanʲɪ_ or _vanʲə_.


Well, that's a minor problem compared with the popular anglicised transcriptions like that one: -*ый *as -*yy. *People who don't know at least some Russian are never going to understand how sth like this is pronouced.

I have a question: I always wondered why Russian is so often transcribed using English alphabet instead of Polish, Czech or Slovak, which are way more compatibile with it (esp. Polish, since it has a lot of different soft consonants like ś, ź, ć, etc., hard "sz", hard "y" and Czech lacks all the diphthongs Russian has) and all the forms would be perfecly differentiated: Wania, Wani, Wanie.


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## ahvalj

Karton Realista said:


> I have a question: I always wondered why Russian is so often transcribed using English alphabet instead of Polish, Czech or Slovak, which are way more compatibile with it (esp. Polish, since it has a lot of different soft consonants like ś, ź, ć, etc., hard "sz", hard "y" and Czech lacks all the diphthongs Russian has) and all the forms would be perfecly differentiated: Wania, Wani, Wanie.


The main reason is that the transliteration is just transliteration, a matter of convenience, not anything serious or official. The language has only one formal alphabet — the Cyrillic one. In the past, transliteration was performed differently for French and German (English wasn't a prestigious language until the twentieth century), so the same person may have written himself both _Pouchkine_ and _Puschkin _or_ Jiline _and _Shilin_. I transliterated yesterday the surname _Броушкин_ as _Breauhouchequine_  for fun. In the recent past, many scientists transcribed their surnames differently even in the papers written or translated into English (e. g. I have an older colleague who was both _Kirichkova_ and _Kiritchkova, _depending apparently from the moon phase). Some people use their own ways, e. g. not everybody can back-transliterate _Hvalj_ into Russian. So, it simply depends on the personal preferences, and since virtually nobody here (but me ) has any idea about the Polish or Czech orthographies, then… (I recall having seen a map of Moscow for the 1980 Olympics transliterated in the Czech manner, though).

In the early Soviet times, there was an attempt to move all the languages of the USSR into the Latin script, and almost all the newly literary languages in the 20's and early 30's acquired Latin alphabets. The Latin alphabet for Russian was in development as well, but it never materialized. One of the reasons, I guess, is the practical impossibility to express the palatalized consonants: one simply can't do it consistently since either most consonants will receive variants with diacritics (_семь → śeḿ, девять → d́ev́at́_), or the text will consist for some 30% of the palatalization signs (_sьemь, dьevьatь_). Laypeople sometimes use _ä, ö_ and _ü_ to substitute _я, ё _and _ю_ (e. g. _Любовь _→ _Lübov_ _— "Lübov" - Google Search_), but this is not serious, of course.


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## ahvalj

ahvalj said:


> the same person may have written himself both _Pouchkine_ and _Puschkin _or_ Jiline _and _Shilin_.


As a modern example: http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/dr_piliulkin/16083319/239300/239300_800.jpg


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## olaszinho

ahvalj said:


> _более новый_ sounds clumsy and artificial, while _новее_ can't be used attributively.



I didn't know that the comparatives formed with _более + adjective _sounded clumsy and artificial. They are normally used in all my Russian textbooks, even in those printed in Russia.


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## ahvalj

They are used since they are the only forms available, but they still haven't reached the level of informality and smoothness the grammatical categories require.

When possible, people tend to restructure the sentences and use the original Comparatives, e. g. _do you have a newer model?_ can be translated as _нет ли у вас более новой модели?, _but most people will say _нет ли у вас модели поновее?, _where the adjective is converted from an attributive "do you have a newer model?" into a predicative "do you have a model [that is] newer?". Of course, this is only possible in selected contexts, and elsewhere the speakers have to deal with this clumsy _более новый._

This disappearance of declension in the Comparatives (_новее _is the former Nom./Acc. Sg. neuter of the once declinable Comparative: Old East Slavic Nom. Sg. _новѣи/novějь_ [masculine], _новѣиши/novějьši_ [feminine], _новѣѥ/nověje_ [neuter]) is a classical example that the changes, i. e. mutations, can often be negative and cause disruptive effect on the language.

Another general consideration. The loss of declension in the Russian Comparative is attested, if I am not mistaken, beginning with the 13th century: 7–8 centuries later the language still hasn't developed a fully functional replacement. That contradicts the theory that e. g. _clāriōr_ first gets replaced by_ magis/plus clārus_ and then disappears (though this works in case of Romance): there are examples when the form goes out of fashion and disappears first, and then the language tries to develop a substitute.


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## olaszinho

ahvalj said:


> When possible, people tend to restructure the sentences and use the original Comparatives, e. g. _do you have a newer model?_ can be translated as _нет ли у вас более новой модели?, _but most people will say _нет ли у вас модели поновее?, _where the adjective is converted from an attributive "do you have a newer model?" into a predicative "do you have a model [that is] newer?". Of course, this is only possible in selected contexts, and elsewhere the speakers have to deal with this clumsy _более новый._



Interesting... Thank you for your detailed explanation.


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