# Irregular предложный падеж: в саду...



## franknagy

Gentle Russian Participarts,
There are some words which make their irregular предложный падеж with stressed *у* after the prepositions *в* and *на*, *only*: 
_В саду, на берегу, на борту, на краю, во рту, на лбу, в шкафу, в углу._
Is it a closed set or it is speading in the present language?
Which words have I omitted?
Is it a remainder of a 8th падеж?

Regards
         Frank


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## gvozd

You can read about it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_case#Russian

The locative case isn't considered as a peculiar case in modern Russian. It's just a form of the prepositional case. It's, so to speak, remains of Old Russian. There were more declensions in it than now.


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## Maroseika

I would not call this "irregularity", this is the remnant of Locative (местный падеж), sometimes also called Second Prepositional (второй предложный). 
The number of such nouns is much larger, than these 8 examples, but I think you are right - this is the closed set, new nouns are declined only according to the Prepositional Case. 
More details here (  §§ 1182, 1183).


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## ahvalj

The Prepositional case itself is the Locative, just renamed for some unknown reasons in the modern russian grammars.


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## Maroseika

ahvalj said:


> The Prepositional case itself is the Locative, just renamed for some unknown reasons in the modern russian grammars.



How, for example, о колесе or при загорании can be interpreted on the base of Locative? Of course, historically it really  originates from the IE locative, but in Russian its function has strongly widened and converging Prepositional Case to the mere Locative seems to me confusing in a way.


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## ahvalj

Maroseika said:


> How, for example, о колесе or при загорании can be interpreted on the base of Locative? Of course, historically it really  originates from the IE locative, but in Russian its function has strongly widened and converging Prepositional Case to the mere Locative seems to me confusing in a way.


That's irrelevant, one should not rename a grammatical category just because he decides that a certain meaning it expresses is more important than the others, otherwise the grammatical structures across languages will become much less transparent. The Russian Prepositional case is named Locative in all the other Slavic languages that possess it, and there is nothing in its modern Russian usage that distinguishes it from the Old Russian, Polish, Czech, Old Church Slavonic etc. Moreover, every other case expresses a range of meanings, often unrelated to its title (Accusative does not necessarily accuse, Genitive — does not necessarily generate etc.).

I may be wrong in another way: I don't know exactly the full story, but I guess the term "Locative" was unknown to the early authors of the Church Slavonic and Russian grammars (since this case in Latin had almost disappeared) and the grammarians were unable to correlate the Russian and Latin facts, so they invented new terms they found appropriate. Smotritskiy calls it «сказательный падеж» (http://litopys.org.ua/smotrgram/sm33.htm), Lomonosov (the author of the present term) — «предложный» (http://feb-web.ru/feb/lomonos/texts/lo0/lo7/lo7-3892.htm — see §58). Yet, I would have preferred an etymological term to have been introduced in the 19th century when the relationships between languages became clear.


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## learnerr

Maroseika said:


> How, for example, о колесе or при загорании can be interpreted on the base of Locative? Of course, historically it really  originates from the IE locative, but in Russian its function has strongly widened and converging Prepositional Case to the mere Locative seems to me confusing in a way.


Very easily. You do something when your actions are located in logical proximity of the situation of fire; the essence of your talking whirls around the notion of a wheel. How it is different from the situation with the Instrumental case?


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## Maroseika

learnerr said:


> Very easily. You do something when your actions are located in logical proximity of the situation of fire; the essence of your talking whirls around the notion of a wheel. How it is different from the situation with the Instrumental case?



I'm not sure I understand what you mean. At least exactly the same way we can say that Dative is connected with location (you take smth me, and this smth is now with me, in my place).


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## Maroseika

ahvalj said:


> Yet, I would have preferred an etymological term to have been introduced in the 19th century when the relationships between languages became clear.



I think at least at this forum we better don't confuse people stating that modern Prepositional Case is nothing else than Locative. They have a hard time making out our Cases, and understanding of Prepositional as referring only to location, is really misleading.


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## ahvalj

Maroseika said:


> I think at least at this forum we better don't confuse people stating that modern Prepositional Case is nothing else than Locative. They have a hard time making out our Cases, and understanding of Prepositional as referring only to location, is really misleading.


But why do you take this term so literally? it is just a combination of letters to identify a grammatical category, nothing more. By the way, "Prepositional" may be even more confusing for a novice since it implies that all the other cases are used without prepositions ,-)


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## learnerr

Maroseika said:


> At least exactly the same way we can say that Dative is connected with location (you take smth me, and this smth is now with me, in my place).


Right! But the difference is, with Dative the thing begins to be at your place ("дали мне сумку", the bag is now with me; also, "он подошёл ко мне"), while with Locative it has not come from anywhere ("говорили обо мне", the words do concern me -- they have not come to my place, they are just near me). Another difference is, the Dative seems to talk about what approaches _me_, while the Locative talks about what happens to be related to _my place_.


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## Maroseika

I still think attempts to explain any modern application of Prepositional case in terms of mere location notion are too artificial. However these theoretical discussion is too far from the scope of the thread, so I suggest to stop it.


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## learnerr

Maroseika said:


> I still think attempts to explain any modern application of Prepositional case too artificial.


To me, they are most natural possible. Okey, let's stop.


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## AndrasBP

Szia Frank!

I wouldn't like to join the discussion here, but to answer your original questions, here are two points:
1. the phenomenon is not productive, it's a closed set of words.
2. apart from the ones you mentioned, there are a number of other words with this ending:
в лесу, на мосту, на боку, в гробу, на льду, в снегу, на полу, в плену

Üdvözlettel,
András


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## ahvalj

AndrasBP said:


> Szia Frank!
> 
> I wouldn't like to join the discussion here, but to answer your original questions, here are two points:
> 1. the phenomenon is not productive, it's a closed set of words.
> 2. apart from the ones you mentioned, there are a number of other words with this ending:
> в лесу, на мосту, на боку, в гробу, на льду, в снегу, на полу, в плену
> 
> Üdvözlettel,
> András


We didn't discuss the original topic because it was fully answered by Maroseika in the post #3 (see the referenced site, paragraph 1182).


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## CKM367

I can recall a quotation from Tolstoy's "War & Peace": " Нет, а чего бы я желал, – прибавил он, прожевывая пирожок в своем красивом влажном рте, – так это вон туда забраться". I shuddered as I read that.


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## franknagy

Hello Everybody,
There are so many answers that I am unable to quote and thank them to the authors one by one. 
I rather continue in new threads with other questions invoked by the saying
"Если бы, да кабы, во рту росли грибы."

Regards,
   Frank


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