I have just arrived in Kazan for the summer; in Russian the city is spelled Казань, which is a third-declension feminine noun:

Казань is located about 450 miles east of Moscow, in a political subunit of Russia called Tatarstan:

The other day I came across an intriguing quote in a blog entry on Irish English:

Another interesting influence from Irish is its absolute lack of the words yes or no, so when our ancestors were speaking English as a second language, they would translate how they would use such words originally in Irish.

Although international English influences mean young people do this way less nowadays, a lot of us Irish still simply don’t use these words. In the Irish language (and in other languages like Thai for example), this issue is resolved by simply repeating the verb of the question. Can you swim? I can! Do you like tomato juice? I don’t. Are you coming? I amn’t.

Yes you read that right: amn’t. This is one I’m surprised other English speakers don’t use! You say isn’t, don’t, aren’t… It’s logical if you ask me!

The Russians can do precisely the same thing. Instead of answering yes to a yes-no question, they can simply repeat the verb. Instead of saying no, they repeat the verb with не in front of it. I generally prefer to translate this construction with phrases like do/don't , was/wasn't, have/haven't:

This phrases can be preceded by да and нет as well:

Sometimes this response can seem very curt, if not downright rude, to the American ear. I once had the following conversation with a woman passer-by in Russia:

At first I was offended. But then my ratiocination kicked in and I reminded my emotional self that Russian intonation that seems rude to the American ear is often perfectly polite in Russia, and that Russian grammatical constructions don't necessarily have the same emotional content as parallel English structures. I asked a couple Russian teachers about it and was told that for many speakers of Russian this standard response pattern is perfectly normal and doesn't imply irritation or hostility.

PS. I have never seen this verbal response pattern given an official name in the academic literature of Russian. I propose “bipolar verbal response pattern.” How's that for academese?

Let's say a first year Russian student wants to know how to say “paragraph.” He looks it up in the dictionary (and then does some reverse dictionary sleuthing) and finds that the word абзац means “indentation,” that bit of space that one leaves at the beginning of a paragraph before the first letter. Thus a paragraph that begins «с абзаца» “with an indentation” (lit. “from an indentation”) will look like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

From that meaning, the word абзац extends to mean the space between two such indents, in other words, a paragraph:

Another phrase for indentation is красная строка. Красная in this context has nothing to with the color red, but rather with the old fashioned meanings of красный, which sometimes had the sense of beautiful, special or honorable:

Концерт is the Russian word for concert. In terms of declension it is a perfectly regular noun, but bear in mind that it is a на word: when you talk about going to or being at a concert, you must use the preposition на instead of в, and when returning from a concert you must use the preposition с:

Sometimes the Russian word каждый ‘every’ has an interesting interaction with the preposition по + dative singular. In effect, the по means ‘apiece’ or ‘each’. We call this the ‘distributive’ meaning of по:

Of course, in those contexts the каждый is redundant, so the sentence can be said the same way without it, in which case the people to whom things are given will most likely be expressed in the plural:

Oddly enough, if the number of things issued to the recipients is more than one, then the number phrase is accusative instead of dative: