"У него есть собака?"
Translation:Does he have a dog?
17 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
They're the same pronoun, the "н" just gets inserted before pronouns that start with a vowel when they fall after a preposition, supposedly to aid in pronunciation (or so I've been told).
One thing to be careful about: Russian's third person possessive pronouns are indeclinable, and they are identical to the third person personal pronouns in the genitive and accusative cases (его, её, and их). However, they do not get the filler "н" after prepositions. So, for example, if you wanted to say "His father has a dog" it would be "У его отца есть собака."
supposedly to aid in pronunciation (or so I've been told).
The official version is like this: some prepositions originally had -n at the end in proto-Slavic (*sъ(n) → Rus. с/со, *къ(n) → Rus. к/ко, *vъ(n) → Rus. в/во; in this reconstruction ъ marks a very short u-like vowel). However, this n was only pronounced when the next word started with a vowel.
Eventually the forms *sъ, *kъ, *vъ came to be used before most words (because the *sъ/sъn, *kъ/kъn, *vъ/vъn alteration made no sense to the speakers), but in the most common cases n retained. Those were cases of «preposition + pronoun». So, n was reinterpreted as a part of the pronoun, and eventually this form of pronoun became used after other prepositions too (hence we have «у него», even though «у» never had n in the end in the first place).
«Него» is used after prepositions, «его» is used when it's not preceded by a preposition.
Please try this link for Alphabet details: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Russian/Alphabet Russian letter "г" has exceptions...
Hi. Shouldn't "собака" decline to "собакы"? Regards from Madeira Island