"Это самое высокое здание в городе."
Translation:This is the tallest building in the city.
10 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
1364
I think it a way of turning an ordinary adjective into a superlative. In English, we can usually do that by either adding an est onto the adjective, or putting a most in front of it. We usually only use the most form for multi-syllable adjectives in English (we say biggest rather than most big, but say most gigantic rather than giganticest). So (as a non-Russian) I'm imagining it plays the role of most.
Yes, that's correct.
You can also use высочайшее but this one is not even used in written language that much. In spoken speech the structure with самый is usually the way to go (you can use лучший/худший on their own).
- 1185
ah ok thanks. this can be confusing sometimes because my native language is Slovenian. the escalation of adjectives is structured differently. for instance, tall = visok and tallest = najvišji. thats why it's hard for me to get used to adding another word to escalate the adjective such as "самое"
We also have наивысший but it is even more of a bookish/poetic word ("Напряжение достигает наивысшей точки"). Высший in general covers the more figurative meaning of "high", the one you see in высшее учебное заведение or высшая математика.
Наивысочайший also exists but it is fairly rare, with 7 instances in the 320-million corpus.
It is the same with other adjectives: we have длиннейший, нижайший, широчайший, крупнейший, популярнейший and even наидлиннейший, наинижайший, наиширочайший, наикрупнейший, наипопулярнейший—we just do not cover them in the course. A few of them like наибольший and наименьший are at least common (well, not in speech).
I wr "'tote This is the tallest building in town
Which is what one would actually say.
t was marked wrong because I didn't write 'the town'
I think this needs correcting to accept the answer without the "the"'
Здание seems plural, but means (one) building. Where does this word come from? Is there some word like 'здань' or whatever that could mean individual flat, or something like that? Is there some logic behind this word's ending '-еи' (typical for plurals)?
The word ends in -ие, not -еи. Russian plurals do not end in -е (save for indeclinable words which end in the same thing in all forms).
It is a fairly typical nominalisation (build→a building). The verb it is base off is, however, not in use anymore. Other such nouns include решение "decision", задание "task, assignment", занятие "occupation", мнение "opinion".