По

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

In another post, somebody used по in a sense I'm not familiar with, as Кто Эдуард по профессии? meaning "What's Edward's job?" I think I got a bit confused with the prefix по- against the preposition по.

Ok, bear with me a moment here. This is what I get so far.

The по- construction (with hyphen) means "in the way of", or at least that's the most general way of expressing it in English. It also seems to do weird things to the following word, so we get по-русски not по-русскому (по русскому would mean "in the opinion of a Russian", right?) and по-мОему "my way" vs. по моемУ "according to my (something)". It's more like a prefix than a preposition.

По without the hyphen is a real preposition taking the dative case whether it's used literally, meaning "along", or figuratively, meaning "according to", or something like "in the sense of" ("Who are you according to your beliefs" would mean in English, to me at least "Who do you believe you are" and not "What are your beliefs".) But you might say "По моим убежениям, Бога нет" (if you were an atheist).

How about "по X" = "as far as X is concerned", as in:

Кто Эдуард по профессии? = "Who is Edward, as far as his job is concerned?"
По национальности я русский = "As far as nationality is concerned, I'm Russian."
По прогнозу синоптиков сегодня будет дождь = "As far as the weather forecast is concerned, it's going to rain today"

It sounds awkward, but then we don't use that construction in English, so any attempt to describe it is going to sound awkward.

(Edit to explain the background)

Comments

Re: not necessarily names of animals

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

Well, technically сын and охотник are both names of animals, but you already know I'm a smart-arse, right? сыновий and охотничий are in the same "class" of relative adjectives that decline like третий, though, so it doesn't mean the rule is invalid, just that I didn't state it properly. Relative adjectives in -ий that insert a soft sign in declension keep that soft sign when used with the по- prefix.

Thanks for the clarification! As I said elsewhere, the computational linguist in me still thinks that Russian grammar can be made to make sense, although some native speakers might disagree ;)

Re: not necessarily names of animals

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

Well, you might naively assume that since -ский becomes -ски, then all adjectives make their по- forms by simply leaving off the й. But in fact the adverb form clearly comes from somewhere else in the declension.

In fact, I'm not a "real" computational linguist, just a programmer who's interested in languages. And I rarely post to my lj blog. But you are more than welcome. I shall do likewise, provided you don't object to my using it nefariously for reading practice ;)

Re: not necessarily names of animals

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

I wasn't disagreeing with you, I was just expressing myself badly. Of course you didn't say that it was always about removing the й; it was me that wrongly tried to form the adverb from the "dictionary form" волчий rather than the stem волчь- . I think you're right in suggesting that the и in волчий might be treated as a fleeting vowel that appears only in the masculine nominative singular. The fact that it's the form you see when you open your dictionary might confuse the naive reader (like me) who doesn't immediately twig that it has that type of declension. That's really all I meant.

As for the -ов and -ин, it was my understanding that they were another class of relative adjective, that decline like nouns in some cases and like adjectives in others. But I don't want to start another debate on the topic ;)