Thread: a pretty basic question about the "prepositional" case

Hi there,
recently I have start to learn something about the prepositional case, to my understanding , what this case does most importantly is indicate where something is at, or where people at. That's what I think about the prepositional case at a moment. So what you have to do to make a place a prepositional case is most commonly to add "е".

So for example. the letter is in the envelope can be written as : письмо в конверте. Quite straight-forward.

However I came across a sentence like this over the textbook, there is a phrase written as followed:
Анна уже написала письмо и положила его в конверт. I guess it could be translated to `Anna already finished writting letter and put it in the envelope`.

Here are my question->oes the written phrase seemed grammatically correct to you? or is it just a textbook misprint?
You can see clearly , that there is no 'e' at the end. If the phrase seemed correct to you, then I would like to understand why. Logically speaking tho, I thought that put object in something...that 'something' will always be in prepositional case. Unfortunately that rule is not applied here. i am kind of stuck. very sorry for my knowledge to prepositional case is only skin-deep, your help would be greatly appreciate if just a few line of explaination.
thanks for reading.

Originally Posted by jameschen

Анна уже написала письмо и положила его в конверт. I guess it could be translated to `Anna already finished writting letter and put it in the envelope`.

Here are my question->oes the written phrase seemed grammatically correct to you?

Yes, it's 100% correct.
где? в конверте
куда? в конверт

The phrase is absolutely correct.

In Russian, if you are talking about a place where an object IS (stands, lies); is situated; in other words, there is no action with a direction (like going to the cinema, putting into the envelope, etc) - you use the prepositional case.
The letter is in the envelope. - Письмо в конверте.
The prepositional case answers the question "ГДЕ?" - Where?

But when there is a direction about the action, when something happens with an object (Anna put the letter in the envelope - there is a direction: in(to) the envelope), use the accusative case.
The letter has been put in the envelope. - Письмо положили в конверт.
The accusative case answers the question "КУДА?" - [TO] where?

Thanks very much for you guys reply. greatly appreciated.

This construct is called "the accusative of motion." The word that is the object of the motion is in the accusative case. For the word конверт and other masc. and neuter nouns you can't really tell what case it is, but just substitute a feminine noun and it will be obvious.

The cat put the letter in the hat. Кошка положила письмо в шляпу.
А теперь письмо в шляпе.

What grammar book are you using for your study?

As you have learned here, some prepositions govern more than one grammatical case. Here's something about the accusative of motion with various prepositions:
http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/prepacc.html

This one looked like a good possibility, but I could not get the Cyrillic text to render properly. Maybe you can:
http://www.rlcentre.com/materials/russi ... onal.shtml

Hi Chaika
thanks also for your explaination, now I got an idea of what is the difference of the two cases.
I am using the textbook called the "ДОРОГА В РОССИЮ, учебник русского языка" I can safely bet you have never heard of this text book before because it was printed mainly for the Chinese students.
Thanks however for your help on the external resources. Greatly appreciated .
best regards
James