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- "My place is at home."
"My place is at home."
Translation:Моё место дома.
73 Comments
«В дом» means 'into house'. The preposition «в» has different meanings depending on whether it's used with accusative case or with prepositional.
«В» with accusative case form means the destination of movement («в дом» 'into the house'); since your place is not moving, or leading into the house, you can't use «в дом» here.
«В» with prepositional case («в до́ме» 'in [the] house') could work here, but this would mean house as a building. To get a metaphorical meaning of дом, 'home', like a place where you belong, you need to use the adverb «до́ма» and not «в до́ме».
Thank you for all clear explanations. You are a teacher, aren't you? I say, no doubt any more on the different subjects (you 've explained) for my part. And,if I may say that : you' re not poisonous at all as the frog you take as icon. ;-)
I'm sorry but I can't get my head around this. If дома is an adverb - does it mean "homely"? My place is homely? And I thought adverbs mainly ended in o or sometimes и. I am so confused...
До́ма is not 'homely' but 'at home'. English doesn't have an adverb with exactly the same meaning as the Russian «до́ма».
English 'homely' is not actually an adverb in My place is homely. It's an adjective. Originally English -ly was a suffix used for both adjectives and adverbs (its German relative -lich still works like this), and adverbs and adjectives weren't distinguished.
In Modern English, -ly came to be attached mostly to adverbs, but some adjectives have -ly too (another example is friendly), and some adverbs don't have -ly.
The difference between adjectives and adverbs is that:
- adjectives describe nouns (homely place),
- while adverbs refer to verbs (I walk slow), adjectives (in really homely place, really is an adverb, homely is an adjective) or sentence in general.
Russian adverbs work roughly in the same way as English do: ую́тное место 'homely place, cozy place', я иду́ ме́дленно 'I walk slowly'.
I say roughly, because in Russian, adverbs have one more notable usage. They can be used to describe environment or some requirements:
- в до́ме хо́лодно 'in the house, it's cold'; хо́лодно 'it's cold; coldly' is an adverb,
- на́до купи́ть молока́ 'It's neccessary to buy some milk, I need to buy some milk'; на́до 'it's neccessary' is an adverb',
- мне нельзя́ ошиба́ться 'I can't make mistakes' (literally, 'for-me it's-forbidden to-make-mistakes'), «нельзя́» is an adverb.
@szeraja_zhaba
English doesn't have an adverb with exactly the same meaning as the Russian «до́ма».
Sure it does -- it's "home" as in "I'm home"="я дома".
Granted, English adverb "home" can also correspond to another Russian adverb, "домой": "I'm going home"="Я иду домой".
The only thing that makes sense to me is that it is in the genitive case - where the rule is that masculine nouns ending in a consonant get an a on the end.
1398
Так ("доброе спасибо") в России не говорят. Может быть: "большое спасибо", "огромное спасибо", "спасибо от всей души" и т.п. Но не "доброе спасибо"!
P.S. Белорус может сказать "добре". Но это = good
В России раньше слово добрый могло использоваться в смысле "good"
Например: "добрый топор", "добрая девчина" и т.п.
Но сейчас это анахронизмы)
I other instances like "Is mom at your place?" The "у тебя" was used. Why not "у дома"? Спасибо!
Well... It does feel old-fashioned, but theoretically «дома» could refer to a city or to a contry. Also, unfortunately, way too many people want to return to the 'good old times'. :/
What do you mean by 'Old Russian'? Russian is constantly changing, so the further you go into the past, the more different it gets. Which time period are you referring to?
With this sentence, there's nothing old-fashioned about the language, it's the idea that someone needs to stay at home for most part of the time that is old-fashioned.
i was thinking of the 1950s, but i am more curious about the russian language from 1900-1918 around there before the russian revolution. You know alot of people, atleast i, connect a high pitched british accent to the victorian and edwardian age, I was curious if russian has undergone similar changes, which i think is possible because of the russian revolution, ww1 and everything else.
Grateful for answer
The biggest changes are in the orthography. Before 1917, Russian has more letters (e.g. место was written мѣсто), other rules for hyphens (e.g. кто-нибудь was written кто нибудь), hard signs after hard vowels at the end of the sentence (e.g. дом was written домъ).
This is used quite often, to give some stylistic effect, e.g. we have an antiques shop called «Антикваръ»:
It's often used incorrectly. For example, there's a shop Обувѣ in Russia (which is supposed to mean обувь 'footwear', but it's in fact обуве, unknown form with unknown meaning).
Pronounciation was different too (e.g. виделись was often pronounced as виделис), and so was grammar (e.g. feminine plurals: но́выя кни́ги 'new books' vs. moden но́вые кни́ги, different participles: быть спасену́ instead of быть спасённым 'be saved'), but these differences are not widely known and not often used for stylistic effect.
If someone wanted to make the speech more old-fashioned, I think the usual way is to drop in more Church Slavonic words (e.g. зла́то 'gold' instead of зо́лото). Church Slavonic used to be the literary language before XVIII century, and its influence on Russian has gradually diminished, so the text with Church Slavonic words sounds more old-fashioned.
I read it from an introvert perspective like "ah yes my place is home"
Russian nouns have 3 genders: feminine (e.g. земля́ 'land, earth'), masculine (e.g. дом 'home, house') and neuter (e.g. ме́сто 'place'). Adjectives and adjective-like pronouns change their form depending on the gender of the noun they modify: моя́ земля́, мой до́м, моё ме́сто.
With plural nouns, you always* use мои́, gender is not distinguished.
* Well, in the nominative case... :D If you don't know what it means, don't worry, you learn soon. ^^'
Is there a word we can use for "is" in this case? Because I always thought that "дома" meant simple "at home"
If you really need to use 'is' (for example, to explain the English grammar word-by-word), you could use «есть». But it would sound very unnatural because «есть» is normally omited in the present tense, except in 'there is/are'-type sentences (and in sentences about 'having', which are in fact just a subtype of 'there is/are'-sentences).
Why not "мои" if they mean the same thing? What do the different "moy"s mean?
Мои / moi (pronounced like маи́, with stress on и / i) is used with plural nouns.
Мой / moy (with stress on о / o) is used with singular masculine nouns.
There's also моя́ / moya for singular feminine nouns, and моё for singular neuter nouns.
In this sentence, the correct pronunciation is до́ма.
До́ма means 'at home' or 'of a/the house' (singular genitive), дома́ means 'houses' (plural nominative or plural accusative).
Шэрая жаба, спосиба вам for having taken your time to explain this so thouroughly! I fear only that I will again commit the same mistake (slow learner). Thank you, and all who help others!
Because до́ма is not a productive word-formation pattern in modern Russian, you can't create new words using it.
Some suffixes are productive and can be used for any word, while others are not, and are limited to a handful of words. Compare a similar situation in English: you can behead someone but not beleg. Some ways of forming new words no longer work (adding be- in English to mean 'remove something', adding -а in Russian to mean 'at some place'), and they are only used in a few older words, but no new words are made with them.
Most words use «в/на + Prepositional» to express the meaning 'in/at some place'. So this is why we say «в па́рке». However, «до́ма» is still used because it got a different meaning from «в до́ме»: «в до́ме» means 'in a house, in the house', while «до́ма» means 'at home'.
You need to learn that for the words you encounter.
Often, you can guess the gender by looking at the word form (e.g. if it ends in -а/я in nominative singular it’s feminine, if it ends in a consonant it’s masculine, if it ends in -о/e it’s neuter), but this is not always reliable.
Hate to throw a wrench into all of this, but is there any reason one could not translate this with
Моё место домой.
Thanks in advance for any insight you can add to this variation.
What does "моё место" mean in this context? In English "my place" can mean "where i belong" or "my home." Is it the same in Russian, or are there other implications?
моё место (other people's "places", too) can be used to express a place where you person belong or where they you should be. However, we do not use место to refer to someone's home. To say that, you can use, e.g. у+Genitive+дома ("at someone's home) or even у+Genitive in some structures.
Nor should it. "На" is the wrong preposition to use here and, anyway, "дома" would be the wrong case for that preposition even if you could use it (you can't!).
It sounds unnatural. We usually don’t use «есть» in «X is Y» sentences (only in «there is Y» or «X has Y», but even in these it’s not always used).
