talking about how old you are

[ratcreature]

I'm still a beginner with Russian, and I am confused about a sentence example that is in my text book for talking about how old somebody is. The book does not explain all the parts, just gives the translation.

The sentence in question is "Ей ещё нет и тридцати." and the translation given is "She is not yet thirty." (well that in German, because that is my native language). I do not understand what exactly the "и" is doing in this sentence? Why is it there?

The grammar section just explains the basic examples, i.e. that you put the person in dative + number + год/года/лет, depending on what the number is. And I understand that number in the example above is genitive above because of the negation, "ещё" is to express the "yet" and that "лет" can be omitted just like in English if the context is clear, but not the "и".

Comments

[elvit]

Don't know anything about theory... If I had to translate Russian sentence into English though I'd use "even" for "и". She is not even thirty. So it must have the meaning of emphasis I guess.

[ratcreature]

Thanks! That helps a lot! I can see how that would work. I think in grammar this use is called a "particle".

So is this a common way to express emphasis? Like, is it used in sentences without a negative too? E.g. if you wanted to say "There is even cake!" (you hadn't expected there to be any -- sorry my range of topics is still very, very small, lol), could a Russian sentence be "Есть и торт!"?

[xs46bm52]

Yes, you can say it that way :)

[ratcreature]

Thanks for confirming. I now feel much clearer on how it works.

[elvit]

I'm so sorry, I saw your comment only today while cleaning my mailbox.
You know this community is a kind of a backup for livejournal one.
If you've got an account: http://learn-russian.livejournal.com
- You'll get more answers and much quicker there.

[ratcreature]

Maybe but I stopped using LJ after their latest TOS changes and on more importantly for practical reasons because of the advertising expansion. Like, these days LJ when I do visit because content is linked, it is often unusable on mobile (where I don't have an adblocker) because they allow these obnoxious ads that block page access with a pop-up telling you you have won something like an iPhone or other crap and try to trick you into clicking on stuff and you can't even get back to the original page.

Just now when I clicked on your link to LJ I got a pop-up I couldn't close except by closing the browser tab, that made my tablet vibrate and made notification sounds, and that despite having disallowed regular popups. Somehow these ads use some other mechanism in chrome to circumvent the no-popups setting.

[elvit]

That's sad. :(
as far as I know this community appeared after these latest TOS changes too, but most people are still there...

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I still have my LJ account and accepted the TOS, so I might check out the comm on a my laptop where I have an adblocker, but it's much easier if you can check on social media from mobile. I used to be able to do that on LJ but not in the last several months.

If their ads behaved halfway decent I could cope, like scrolling past an image or such, but you can't even get out of these ads without clicking on something that looks like malware. The first time encountered ads like that I actually wondered whether my device was infected despite using a virus scanner, but it only happens on certain websites, LJ unfortunately among them, but not at all when I surf elsewhere. So I'm pretty sure it is not me, but them accepting crap advertising partners, that are sometimes borderline malware if not actual malware. I mean in my example above I got a fake Google-branded page in the background of the click button trying to convince me I had won something if I just clicked OK.