Conjugating names.

[thedevilishone.livejournal.com]

How do you conjugate names?? Sometimes when my Russian friend will speak to me, he will say my name differently...

Example: Фелиша to Фелишей.

Thank you.

Comments

[happy-accidents.livejournal.com]

I too found this very mysterious, but alas, depending on the meaning of his sentence, a person's name will change its ending to differentiate whether he is playing tennis with Felicia, playing tennis in front of Felicia, etc. It's pretty confusing, but from what I understand Фелишей would be the use of the instrumental case, meaning he would say it if he wanted to state that he was doing something with you.

[giantantattack.livejournal.com]

Names, in Russian, decline just like nouns since they are, in fact, nouns. Since your name ends in "а" it will decline just like any other noun ending in "а" would. For example,

Nominative case (Именительный падеж): Фелиша
Genitive case (Родительный падеж): Фелиши
Dative case (Дательный падеж): Фелише
Accusative case (Винительный падеж): Фелишу
Instrumental case (Творительный падеж): Фелишей
Prepositional case (Предложный падеж): Фелише

Though, it should be noted that sometimes names do not decline. These are names belonging to females which do not end in "а", "я", or "ь", and foreign names ending in "о", "е", "у", or "и".

[welgar.livejournal.com]

Aha, there is also a rule that foreign female last names do not conjugate.
E.g., for a man called Bill Johnoson it will be:
Nominative: Билл Джонсон
Genitive: Билла Джонсона
Dative: Биллу Джонсону
Accusative: Билла Джонсона
Instrumental: Биллом Джонсоном
Prepositional: (о) Джоне Джонсоне
However, for a woman called Maria Johnson it will look like the following:
Nominative: Мария Джонсон
Genitive: Марию Джонсон
Dative: Марии Джонсон
Accusative: Марию Джонсон
Instrumental: Марией Джонсон
Prepositional: (о) Марии Джонсон
I know, it's confusing (sometimes even for native speakers) but... it's Russian. ;-)

[welgar.livejournal.com]

Of course, prepositional for Bill Johnson will be (о) Билле Джонсоне, not "Джоне".

[yms.livejournal.com]

Roughly speaking, all those Russian cases mean something like this:

Фелиша = Felicia
Фелиши = of Felicia
Фелише = to Felicia
Фелишу = Felicia (with transitive verbs)
Фелишей = by/with Felicia

With various prepositions it's taken in one of these cases.

[borodator.livejournal.com]

Here rule of thumb is easy: male foreign surnames decline, female foreign surnames do not decline.
With russian surnames things can be complicated - usually surnames which have meaning as nouns (like Козел or Сковорода) do not decline even in masculine form (Читал поэму Григория Сковорода, not ... Сковороды). It is to avoid confusion of Ukrainian Poet with frying pan, i think :-)

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

yup -- to make things even funnier, Ukrainian last names decline in Ukrainian but do not decline in Russian: in Ukrainian, it's correct to say Черненко - Черненка - Черненку etc. while in Russian it's all Черненко with no declination, no matter is the bearer of this last name male or female.