Russian Conjugation IV

Russian Conjugation IV

Softness or hardness of the final C. If the final C is soft (palatal or palatalized) it stays soft throughout, and in the 1st sg it is substitutive: вижу видишь видят, люблю любишь любят. As we saw in the last chapter, C-a in a polysyllabic stem (that is, not бра—ть, жда—ть, зва—ть) is substitutively soft before any V. This produces писать писал написан написав ~ пишу пишешь пишут пиши. Without a doubt this is a difficulty for learners, especially when you throw in the past passive participle and get попрошен, куплен, отвечен, but написан, смазан, выколот.

Things are also tricky in the closed stems (consonantal, suffixless), where only the velar stems taken substitutive softening, the others, simple softening. Hence we get: переведён, вывезен ~ испечён, сожжён.

If we understand the types говорить сидеть молчать бояться, писать, мазать, искать, плакать, we turn now to see what happens to the C at the end of all other stem types. It undergoes bare or simple softening before any vowel other than u. Velars display this bare softening only before the zero imperative ending, elsewhere they are subsтitutive. The present tense endings o and i alternate here. Example: лгать ‘to lie, tell untruths’ лгу лжёшь лжёт лгут, лгал, ждать ‘wait for’ жду ждёшь ждут ждал, печь ‘to bake’ пеку печёшь печёт пекут. This includes a number of very important suffixed as well as non-suffixed stems, such as — I give the 3rd sg — живёт, едет, идёт, тонет, исчезнет, берёт зовёт умрёт крадёт.

The imperative. This is a remarkable category, as it has a zero alternating with i (softening the final C). No other inflectional endings in nouns or verbal does this — but no other category is quite like the imperative in function. The vowel occurs after two consonants or with fixed stem stress. будь, оставь, познакомься, ответь, читай, спрашивай, арестуй; чисти, изчезн. Note all the suffixed stems in —j with fixed stress on the stem, and see the two ways Russian has of spelling zero after a soft C: soft sign, short i. Mobile stress items have i: купи, получи, пиши, ищи.

Note the strange-looking imperatives in velars сядь ‘sit’ from сесть and ляг, лягте ‘lie’ from лечь лягу ляжешь. The imperative of this latter has a zero, all right, but no softening at all.

The group j—i is admitted only if the full stem ends in ji—. There aren’t many examples, but one of them is таи ‘hide’ from taji—, but stoj— by rule gives стой, пьй—, пей. Note бояться боишься but бойся, according to his rule here, also смеяться смеёшься смейся, also петь поёт поют, пой, all according to this seeming ad hoc rule.

One more chapter to pull thing together. I will take some sample verbs and show how his rule derives their forms.

This article — if you are still suffering through this summary — came out of a bet Jakobson had with the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, namely, that he could make a set of fully synthronic rules (not referring to historical data) for the explicit derivation of the Russian verb from a single base form.

As I say, people have gone crazy over this for years
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