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Perfective of быть and жить | ||
Tags: Verbs/Conjugation | Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| blauw Tetraglot Groupie Belgium Joined 5376 days ago 46 posts - 111 votes  Speaks: English, Flemish*, French, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 11 03 April 2012 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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While sloughing through the quagmire of Russian verbs, I've come across several sources that claim the perfective of жить is пожить, and several others claiming жить has no perfective. Similarly, some sources list побыть as the perfective form of быть, while still others say that быть has no perfective form.
Why is this? If быть and жить have no perfective forms, how do you express perfective aspect with these verbs? If they do have these perfective forms, why do some sources explicitly state they have no perfective match? What online sources do you use to look up aspect pairs? Any help at all would be much appreciated. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6601 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 11 03 April 2012 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There are no directly corresponding forms and I suppose these indeed come closest, along with пробыть and прожить. The difference between them is mostly lexical imo. When the perfective forms' shades of meaning (temporary, durative etc) don't apply, just use the imperfective forms.
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| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5050 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 3 of 11 03 April 2012 at 9:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My best advice would be to focus on what you want to do.
Do want to understand the nuances meaning of these words? Do you want to be able to express your intended meaning using these words? Then do that, find enough examples of the usage of these and understand how they're used. Don't get bogged down by the question of what is the perfective form of this verb. Unless you're specifically studying for a test where such knowledge would be tested, or you're a linguist doing work along those lines. As to why your sources may or may not present you with these options, well there could be multifarious reasons behind them -- my money is on the theory that they don't want to confuse beginner level audiences or get bogged down in details. I don't want to sound like I'm telling you to RTFM. But Google is the source, or possibly yandex. Also get a good (R-R) dictionary. Lookup быть, побыть, побывать, пробыть, пробывать, жить, пожить, поживать, проживать understand the commonalities and differences, use examples. It might be a good idea to lookup articles on how perfective aspects are created in Russian, in this case with prefixes по-, про-, на-, с-, вы- but that's just an instance not a complete picture. I don't know if you can read Russian, but here is an article, I just googled глагол совершенного вида. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 11 03 April 2012 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Most Russian-something dictionaries take care to quote perfective/imperfective verb pairs - although some use the imperfective form as the main one, and others give this role to the perfective form (or forms). The one thing they don't indicate is whether the forms they quote actually are in common use. In my grammars there are lists of "partner-less" verbs and verbs that can assume both aspects, but I have not controlled systematically how verbs on these lists are represented in the dictionaries.
My Russian-Danish dictionary also indicate adjectival forms for just about every noun in existence, and sometimes I wonder whether all those adjectival forms really are used or just have been constructed to fill out a hole. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5603 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 5 of 11 04 April 2012 at 12:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Do you mean derivations such as дым - дымовой or собака - собачий? They are more common in Russian, because compounds are mostly built by them. A "book shop" is no *книга-магазин* or *магазин книг*, but always a книжный магазин 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4776 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 6 of 11 04 April 2012 at 8:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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As a native speaker I hardly ever think about these things, but I found this blog post by a non-native learner to be enlightening. Long story short, the idea that all verbs come in pairs of imperfective-perfective is a gross oversimplification - in most cases a verb stem can be turned into several imperfective and perfective verbs with differing connotations determined by the affixes that are added. As the other commenters have said, perfective forms have shades of meaning that may or may not apply in a particular case. The fact that many sources pick one of these forms and call it "the perfective of X" is convenient for a learner trying to translate concepts from their native language into Russian, but not an entirely accurate representation of the language's reality.
Edit: And in case you're wondering, пожить and побыть are real words and they are both perfective. Edited by vonPeterhof on 04 April 2012 at 8:30am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6601 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 11 04 April 2012 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Great blog post indeed.
I wonder why I find the same sort of thing in German such a huge problem O_o 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5060 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 8 of 11 04 April 2012 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
"книга-магазин" would mean a book which is simulteniously a shop. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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