15 Comments
I know the Tips & Notes say that the rules for Genitive forms will not be discussed in this course, but could someone briefly explain how the Genitive is constructed?
In order to know about construction of cases you need to know about declension groups in Ukranian and about soft/hard/mixed group. That's a really really complex topic. If you are that interested I may write the whole post about it. But do you really need it?
I think, there should be such a post. If you write one, I'll give you several lingots (that's all I can do for you now). I'm a native Ukrainian speaker, but I would be extremely disappointed if I were left with "it's far too complicated, don't bother yourself with it". We all are here to learn, and everyone's needs are different: there are businessmen or tourists who need a basic grasp, and there are linguists who want nitty-gritty details. Anyway, good luck with the post!
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There are three endings a genitive plural can get: -ів, -ей, and no ending. Feminine nouns almost never get -ів, masculine never get zero ending, apart from that the rules get a bit murky.
In case of гривня, you have a zero ending, then you have to use a soft sign (ь) to preserve in writing the palatisation of н, and then you add an e as an extra vowel to make it pronounceable.
The extra vowels in Ukrainian are о and е. I suspect е is used near palatalised consotants and о otherwise, but I bet there are counterexamples to that.
It's not just about gender, but declension group. There are masculine nouns, that end in a vowel, so they behave themselves similar to feminine nouns. Basically we have 8 different patterns of declension
I accidentally hit the '2' instead of the '3', and ended up writing '26 hryvnyas'. I was let off with a 'you have a typo in your answer'! This should not have been accepted.
It was an accident, yes, but for for all they know it could have been my lack of knowledge. This is probably the first time someone has complained about getting an answer correct!
Yeah, that's stupid that some answers get accepted even though they should not. On the other hand, it works for English and some other European languages where 3 is something like "tre"/"tri", same as in Ukranian and Russian. I mean, they are really hard to screw up unless it is a typo :)
Well, that hapenned to me a lot in French course. (getting typos when those where in fact mistakes)
The pronunciation of цять at the end of numbers sounds to me like "set", and not, as i would expect, "tsyat". This has been consistent across all lessons. Is this the effect of the soft-sign?
