Thread: Position Of adjectives

It make me mad! Ahh! I work with people of Latvia and Ukraine and when we speak in russian eh they sometimes say the adjectives after the noun and then sometimes before the noun!? Can one place adjectives wherever they would like? I hope you understand what I mean :S

It's possible both ways. Usually, they precede noun.

But both of the ways are both perfectly correct? I am correct? Example I give you;

Ty zneash' chto est ukrainskaya devushka, kotoraya rabotaet v restorane.

Is the same as,

Ty znaesh' chto est devushka ukrainskaya, kotoraya rabotaet v restorane?

The second has a slight difference for me, meaning uncertainty.

Ahh ok, so adjectives after noun are to uncertainty?

I think here one should remember that an adjective before a noun is usually the most neutral order and you'll never be wrong using it. The other order doesn't necessarily mean hesitation, it could be that at first the speaker didn't intend to specify that the girl is ukranian or wasn't thinking of it but by the time he decided to say that he had already pronounced the word девушка so he adds the adjective after the noun. Of course it happens during some milliseconds. I think there can be other variants too and that depends on the intonation the speaker used. Such order can be also idiomatical (mostly in names) and poetic.

Originally Posted by Pasha

Ahh ok, so adjectives after noun are to uncertainty?

Agree with Friendy. You never know unless you can understand it from the speaker's intonation and gestures.

To me both sound pretty natural and almost identical in meaning. I do not sense any uncertainty in the 2nd phrase (although it could be conveyed by intonation), but it does place a little bit more emphasis on "девушка" rather than on "ukrainskaya":

a). U tebja tut net nikakih znakomyh ukraincev? -- est' odna ukrainskaja devushka, v restorane rabotaet
b). S kem by nam ego poznakomit'? -- est' tut odna devushka ukrainskaja...