Russian Word of the Day

You may remember from yesterday that the case forms of год are:

Today we need to discuss the genitive singular forms. The modern version of the genitive singular is года, but there is an older form that arose as a consequence of the u-stem genitives which nowadays only appears in stock phrases. So you will occasionally find phrases like:

For instance:

There is a tendency in language to make the things that are irregular more regular. Thus the older plural ‘brethren’ in English has been mostly replaced by ‘brothers.’ Similarly nowadays it is much more common in Russian to say «год от года» than «год от году». It is still more common to find «без году неделя» than «без года неделя», but that ratio will most likely eventually change in favor of года.

Language changes. For instance, as I was growing up, I never heard anyone say “You want to come with?” for “Do you want to come with us?” I remember the first time I heard it. I thought “No native speaker of English could possibly ever say that!” I was wrong. All sorts of US native speakers say it nowadays, and nowadays it almost doesn't sound strange to me. This should teach us a lesson. No native speaker ever knows the entirety of his language. And if we find that Russian speakers occasionally give us contradictory language about their native language, this is also normal. In such situations, you need to ask multiple native speakers about your language issue, and then draw a rule of thumb from their responses.

The case forms of год are:

Note the two nominative plural forms. Dictionaries list both, but truth to tell you almost never see the года version for the plural.

Note the two forms for the genitive plural. The form лет is used after numbers and а few other words like много, мало, сколько and несколько. Годов is used everywhere else:

Note the two forms of the prepositional case. The form in -у is used to say "in such and such a year", and the -е form is used as the prepositional case form in other contexts:

We will address the alternative genitive forms tomorrow.

Every once in a while you just want to know an obscure word in a foreign language just to show off to your friends, so today's word is вымя, which means udder. It is one of only ten nouns in modern Russian that end in -мя but are neuter. It declines like this:

The udder is the part of the a cow (or goat or sheep) that houses the mammary glands and teats with which they feed their young:

One of the great things about Russian is the way prefixes and roots combine to make new words. For instance, the prefix в- means ‘into,’ and the root ход- means ‘go.’ Put them together and you get the word вход which means ‘entrance’:

If you want to specify the place to which the entrance gives you access, it is placed after the preposition в in the accusative case:

The word can also be used to mean ‘price of admission’:

The Russian word возможность has multiple meanings, including chance, opportunity and possibility. It is a perfectly regular third declension noun:

Very often the word is best translated into English as chance:

Sometimes the better translation is opportunity: