Location/Direction adverbs in English and Russian

[noser.livejournal.com]

Russian and English happen to have a very similar system of adverbs for describing locations and directions (thx to ataltane for pointing this out. Hey, both languages are Indo-European, aren't they). Unfortunately, with the (ongoing? :) simplification of English many of those adverbs became archaic, with the simple here, there and where displacing the obscure and overwhelming subtleties of direction vs location, and making understanding of Russian adverbs harder for an English speaker. Not sure how many contemporary English speakers know what hither means, but oh well, they can always look it up :) Anyway, I hope these tables at least help to understand how it all works:

English

	At	To	From
This place	Here	Hither	Hence
That place	There	Thither	Thence
What place?	Where?	Whither?	Whence?

Русский

	В	К	От
Этом месте/Этому месту/Этого места	Здесь	Сюда	Отсюда
Tом месте/Тому месту/Того места	Там	Туда	Оттуда
Каком месте/Какому месту/Какого места?	Где?	Куда?	Откуда?

For both tables, you start with selecting a preposition column, then the desired row, so that column title and row title form a reasonable equivalent of the adverb in the corresponding cell, e.g. "At that place" = "There". Because в, к and от require different cases, I listed all three declined row titles, separated by a slash.

Comments

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

here (http://www.livejournal.com/community/learn_russian/229347.html?thread=2901987#t2901987) we discuss наречия места - location/direction adverbs (note that сюда, отсюда, здесь etc. are adverbs, not pronouns.)

[noser.livejournal.com]

Damn! Fixed.

[nadyezhda.livejournal.com]

I love it! Great work! Even if it's archaic, it's still useful in helping me think about the topic...

[gatoradegirl.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that explaination! My final is friday and that's an easy way to remember those adverbs!

[philena.livejournal.com]

Funny thing I learned in my Russian phonology class: В and "in" are direct cognates, both of them stemming from and Indo-European root that was probably a syllabic "n". In English, (well, Germanic) the "n" remained just that, acquiring only the initial vowel, but in Russian the syllabic "n" acquired a different vowel: instead of "i" it acquired something closer to a "u", and the "n" disappeared, remaining only in that the "u" was nasalized. Somewhere along the line the "u" acquired an initial "w" (which later became "v"), and then (or maybe concurrently or before--I'm not entirely clear whether the "w" was acquired first or this happened first) in certain areas of Slavic--such as Russian--, nasalized vowels at the ends of words became de-nasalized. The nasalization, however, would return when the next word began with a vowel--for example, the oblique cases of third-person pronouns. And finally the "u" was lost entirely, leaving only "в" and the "н" acquired in cases such as "в нем."

This implies that unless they were formed in similar manners, the other prepositions which acquire an "н" before pronouns simply do it by analogy to "в," and my professor said that this was certainly the case with the longer ones, such as "около," and that in Russia it's a matter of some debate as to whether an "н" should follow those sorts of prepositions.

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

Is that how you use Thither and Whither and Hither? Awesome, I didn't know that. :)

[oryx_and_crake]

You cannot ever say "этом месте" or "том месте" without a preposition, it is a mistake. You can only use "в этом месте"/"на этом месте". For this reason, this case is called предложный (prepositional).

Besides, "этому месту" и "этого места" do not mean "сюда" и "отсюда". For сюда you should use "в это место" or "к этому месту", for отсюда - "из этого места" or "от этого места". The same is true for the rest of your table.

Туда - в то место
Оттуда - из того места, от того места
Куда - в какое место
Откуда - из какого места, от какого места

[noser.livejournal.com]

> You cannot ever say "этом месте" or "том месте" without a preposition, it is a mistake

You're not supposed to. Read the explanation under the tables. :)

[oryx_and_crake]

Oh, I see. That's kind of complicated...