Adjective agreement for unusual nouns
Jul. 21st, 2005 07:47 pmI'm going over some grammar points, and came across something I'm unsure of. I'll try to explain it as best I can, but I think ultimately I may have the wrong end of the stick.
The small group of nouns causing trouble are those that are masculine but end in -а or -я, such as дядя and дедушка. I understand that despite their misleading endings, these such words are masculine due to their real-world connotation. The problem lies when applying an adjective to these words. Does the adjective take masculine endings, because the noun is masculine? Or does the adjective take a feminine ending to "match" with the noun ending? Instinct tells me it's the former, meaning that the context of the sentence is extremely important to understand the overall meaning. For example, if the tricky noun+adjective is in the accusative, and the adjective takes a masculine ending, this would seem strange to me as a beginner of Russian, and if I didn't realise that the noun was an exception, I'd think there was a mistake in the sentence.
Does this make sense? I'm confusing myself the more I write about it!
EDIT: problem solved already! Thanks for the quick responses. :)
The small group of nouns causing trouble are those that are masculine but end in -а or -я, such as дядя and дедушка. I understand that despite their misleading endings, these such words are masculine due to their real-world connotation. The problem lies when applying an adjective to these words. Does the adjective take masculine endings, because the noun is masculine? Or does the adjective take a feminine ending to "match" with the noun ending? Instinct tells me it's the former, meaning that the context of the sentence is extremely important to understand the overall meaning. For example, if the tricky noun+adjective is in the accusative, and the adjective takes a masculine ending, this would seem strange to me as a beginner of Russian, and if I didn't realise that the noun was an exception, I'd think there was a mistake in the sentence.
Does this make sense? I'm confusing myself the more I write about it!
EDIT: problem solved already! Thanks for the quick responses. :)