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- "Ещё чая, пожалуйста."
62 Comments
So, the literate translation of this sentence would be "More (of the) tea, please"? Therefore, чая is in genitive.
Not exactly.. You can say "чая, пожалуйста." as well. "Дайте" is implied here. Genitive is used when you mean "some quantity of". Although, I think "еще чаю" might be more common. But using accusative wouldn't be such a mistake here, I think. "Еще" doesn't decline a modified word.
Partially disagree. The word Дайте, implied or not, does not automatically lead to the Genitive - дайте воду (accusative) is correct. The “some quantity of”, implied or not, part is crucial here: Give me the water: дайте водУ Give me (some of) water: дайте водЫ Give me glass of water: дайте стакан водЫ You see, a glass is also in some sense a quantity and effectively it’s one same old rule instead of two different ones - the English ‘of’ relation is conveyed in Russian as the Genitive. So, yes, as suggested above, I’d extend the sentence as ‘more (of) tea’ and apply the old rule for Genetive
I, too, would like to hear confirmation from a native speaker, but note that the lesson notes do discuss "чаю" not as an accusative but as a rare remnant of a specifically "partitive" form that nowadays is used commonly only with this noun, чай. Even for чай, it states that this is optional, so the genitive "чая" can also be used as a partitive, at least in terms of meaning, which is more consistent with virtually all other nouns in modern Russian. Except for чай, most nouns no longer have a separate partitive form anymore, apparently, so when the -ю form is used to convey the partitive meaning, it sounds archaic.
I'm not sure, though, if the partitive чаю might only be used when some quantity is actually specified, as in "a cup of tea"...
Also, is this partitive чаю considered more informal or conversational than using чая, or the other way around??
It's definitely not archaic. But, on the other hand, you definitely can survive without partitive. I'm not sure that it's even taught in school.
1461
"Чая, пожалуйста" ("of the tea") still implies wanting additional tea, does it not? Of course, as a partitive, it would not mean all of the tea.
Or just wanting tea for the first time, like "What would like? (tea or coffee or smth else)" - "Tea, please' = Чая, пожалуйста. "Ещё" implies that you had some tea before that.
Why is tea "чая" instead of "чай"? It's not a direct object, and even if it was, it's inanimate so it wouldn't change ending
I agree it's not clear. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's genitive, not accusative, because genitive is necessary after expressions of quantity like "a lot of", "a little ", "more" (ещё), as well as other uses.
I am happy to see this sentence in the "Strengthening" section, which I am doing for at least the third time. I have a query regarding the Partitive Case, which according to "Tips and Notes" for this lesson on the Partitive, is rarely used, except for in the expression << хорешь чашечку чаю? >> which uses the Partitive Case, unlike the expressions given in the exercises here which use << чая >> for "some tea", a Genitive Case expressing the idea of the Partitive. So which is better to use nowadays ? (I read elsewhere that the Partitive Case is no longer taught in Russian schools.) What is the semantic difference, if there is any at all, between << я хосч чаю >> (I want some tea) and << я хочу чая >> (I want some tea) ?
I was interested in this, too, so I did some research and some speculation/extrapolation based off what I found. Here's what I've come to understand:
Partitive as a distinct case came about when the -о and -у declensions in Old East Slavic merged to -о, allowing -у to serve another purpose [1]. Because of this, it was filling a linguistic gap that didn't really exist. Prior to the partitive case, the genitive case was used to express partitive quantities. The partitive case send to have come about somewhat opportunistically as a means of clarity rather than out of necessity as a means to communicate a concept. That is, it didn't allow you to say anything that you couldn't already say before with standard genitive case.
What this means grammatically is that the partitive case is essentially just a second, more specific genitive case, and for most words it declines just like the regular genitive case [2]. If all words simply took genitive declensions, partitive would not exist as it's own case. So why does it? Well some masculine mass nouns and naked plurals have the variant -у/-ю declension in partitive case making it necessary to define a name for this case for everything, even words that don't change, but, as language is continually adapting and changing, younger generations have begun to drop this suffix from most words [2], with «чаю» being one of the few survivors of this purge [3], as well as some other things like alcohol [4]. This change makes some linguistic sense: if every other word is perfectly understandable in a partitive context using a case identical to genitive case, then why do these specific masculine nouns have to use a different form?
At this point it is still grammatically "correct" from a prescriptivist perspective to use partitive case for all of these words, but in common use it's very often dropped [3][4]. In terms of sounding archaic or pedantic, it's similar to hearing someone ask you "to whom are you talking?" instead of "who are you talking to?" It just sounds old fashioned and weird, even though it's technically the "correct" way to say it.
Again, I want to stress that I am not a native speaker or by any means fluent. This is simply what I've picked up in research. Hope this helps!
Here are the sources I was able to relocate: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian [2] http://russianmentor.net/gram/mailbag/topics/gen2.htm [3] https://www.duolingo.com/skill/ru/Partitive/tips-and-notes [4] http://masterrussian.net/f15/use-partitive-case
And for further reading, interesting linguistics paper which analyzes partitive case in Finnish with a decent amount of discussion of and comparison to Russian: https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/wuppertal.pdf
"to whom are you talking?"
If you hear it, it may be from an old-fashioned person. Or a Russian native =D It sounds way more logical than "who are you talking to?".
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as a native speaker I can only add that "чаю" is the only example that I can think of where it does not actually sound archaic. "спирту", "кефиру", "кофею" sound pretty ancient, but not wrong. You can stumble upon them all the time in all sorts of books, but to hear them in colloquial speech would be really weird.
Oops I didn't properly format those references so the numbers show up on the wrong lines in Mobile. The numbers come before the links!
From what I have seen there is no difference except that чай is the one word that people still commonly use the archaic version. Same meaning, but both are acceptable rather than other words that have totally phased out the archaic version.
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Not reporting a problem and I read the comments prior to posting.
I am confused. Eshche raz is "one more time," so why would eshche chaya not be "one more tea?" Does that mean eshche raz could be translated as "some more time"? That doesn't seem like it would flow realistically.
"One more tea"="еще кружку чая" (="еще один чай" can be said in a cafe). Еще чай is about an indefinite quantity since чай is uncountable. Раз is countable, so еще раз is one more time.
sorry despite comments I am still confused. What is the accusative of чай ? If ДАНТЕ is implied, it shoud be followed by an accusative and not a genetive ?
It can be Accusative (sounds still ok), but meaning "some quantity of" it's usually used in Genitive. So in "give me some quantity of tea" tea would be normally in Genitive. Accusative of чай is чай.
If you were saying "give me that tea" you would use the accusative. You use the genitive here only because you're saying "give me some tea."
- 1391
ешё appears to be an adverb, rather than some sort of preposition. Casting чая in genitive seems not to be required because of the word ешё, but simply because a quantity is tea is being requested.
That's more like "i want more tea than what you gave me", not "more of the same"
The а in ча́я will be stressed. Here's a quick declension list with stresses labeled:
- Nom. - ча́й (plural чаи́)
- Gen. - ча́я (pl. чаёв, ё is always stressed)
- Dat./Part. - ча́ю (Dat. pl. - чая́м, no partitive plural)
- Inst. - ча́ем (pl. чая́ми)
- Prep. - ча́е (pl. чая́х)
Note that the initial vowel (а) is stressed in all singular forms, and the second vowel is stressed in all plural forms.
Thank you!
BTW, how do you type the accented letters? That symbol isn't readily available on a Russian Cyrillic (typewriter) keyboard... which I actually find kind of odd. Even if they are rarely used in practice, you'd still think you need to be able to type them... do they exist in the keymap at all or do you need some kind of "trick" to produce them?
I tend to just use my phone keyboard whenever I need to use accents. There is no way to type accents with any standard windows layout without using macros or copy/pasting. Most phone keyboards will have accent characters available if you long-press a key.
If you're using Windows and moderately tech savvy, you could always try writing an AutoHotKey script to type the accented characters for you with a key combination! I might make a post on this at some point.
For copy/paste convenience: а́ ы́ у́ э́ о́ я́ и́ ю́ е́ ё
That's interesting indeed. I wonder why no one in the computer era thought of including a way to produce the accents. It must have always been a nuisance for teachers, linguists etc. who really need them. There's a bunch of other symbols, like brackets etc. that also seem to be completely missing.
For the moment, I'm mostly using a virtual keyboard for Cyrillic. I used to even have customized keycaps on an old keyboard to learn the layout. Duolingo makes things a lot different though, since you constantly need to switch and it's distracting from learning the actual language. I'm not quick enough, not yet anyway. All in time...
If you're using Windows, adding keyboards in the language input settings allows you to switch between them very easily with Win+Spacebar. That removes the need for virtual keyboards while still making switching pretty straightforward.
Oh, I'm using a virtual keyboard where you can click on the key and it outputs the letter into a text field. Right now, I also have the DuoKeyboard extension that switches between layouts automatically. They are useful for different things. I type a lot slower with the Cyrillic layout so depending on what I want to do, I'll use one or the other.
ещё (ješčó) [(j)ɪˈɕːɵ] "yet, more; else; still": From Proto-Slavic *(j)ešče (“still, yet”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁esk(ʷ)e(h₁), probably a compound of *h₁es- (“to be”) + *-kʷe (“conjunctive enclitic”).
Learn previously in the expressión ещё раз (ješčó raz) ("once again").
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Can I say: "One more tea, please", if I'm for example in a cafe and ask a waiter to bring me one more portion?
Anyone else having problems with the translating еще for "yet"? "yet tea"?
- 1391
What do you think "yet tea" means? Even if ешё may mean "yet" in some circumstances, it makes no sense here. If you got it wrong, then Duo was correct in marking you wrong.
Can I just say how UTTERLY infuriating it is to be marked wrong for using ш instead of щ when they LOOK ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME AND MAKE THE SAME SOUND
