Re: Amanda's sentences as translation exercise

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 05:38:53PM +0200, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> H. S. Teoh writes:
> > On Sat, Oct 21, 2006 at 08:33:27PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote:
> > > On 10/21/06, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> > > >        Сегодня я и ребёнка погуляем(?).
[...]
> > Maybe a more correct phrasing might be, Сегодня я с ребёнком
> > погуляем.
>
> I think it is plural even if you are trying to say 'XYZ and *I*'.  So
> 'Сегодня мы с ребёнком погуляем'.
[...]

Interesting. Could a native speaker confirm this please? :-) At any
rate, this greatly increases the coolness factor of Russian for me. :-)

On that note, I'm curious about the historical development of the е/ё
distinction in Russian. Is it a purely Slavic development, or did it
already happen before/during the split from PIE?

I ask 'cos I notice that conjugation I verbs have е as a kind of
"thematic vowel" (-у, -ешь, -ет, -ем, -ете, -ут), which when stressed
becomes ё (-у, -ёшь, -ёт, -ём, -ёте, -ут). This seems remarkably similar
to the Greek e/o thematic vowel alternation in the primary verb endings
(-ω, -εις, -ει, -ομεν, -ετε, -ουσι(ν), -ομαι, -ῃ (-ει),
-εται, -ομεθα,
-εσθε, -ονται, etc.). In fact, when ё follows a "hard" (non-palatized)
consonant, it is realized simply as [o]. From what I understand, ё is
sometimes written simply as е but pronounced as [jo], so ё apparently
developed out of е. My question is whether this happened before or after
proto-Slavic(?) split from PIE?

Also, did the palatized/non-palatized distinction in Russian exist in
PIE, or is it a purely Slavic development? There are some other IE langs
that exhibit this distinction, right?


T

--
This is a tpyo.

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