Thread: Simple Question of Genitive Plural

I decided to put this question into the beginners section because it's a pretty simple question. Usually inflectional endings of nouns don't confuse me, but I've never really caught onto one trend.

This trend is the Zero, or null ending of the genitive plural for nouns, E.g) nom sing: сло́ва (slóva) gen pl: сло́в (slóv)

Как бы мы говорим, без слов?

Could I please have some light shed on the rules for when a genitive plural will use the null inflection?


Thanks a bunch guys and have yourselves a good day.

Originally Posted by Gottimhimmel

I decided to put this question into the beginners section because it's a pretty simple question. Usually inflectional endings of nouns don't confuse me, but I've never really caught onto one trend.

This trend is the Zero, or null ending of the genitive plural for nouns, E.g) nom sing: сло́ва (slóva) gen pl: сло́в (slóv)

Как бы мы говорим, без слов?

Could I please have some light shed on the rules for when a genitive plural will use the null inflection?


Thanks a bunch guys and have yourselves a good day.

Generally - it is very simple: any noun which has -а/-я or -о ending in its dictionary form, takes zero ending in genitive plural.
There are a few exceptions, though: ухо - ушей, око - очей (око is an archaic word for глаз). And also some masculine nouns tend not to take -ов in genitive plural (носок - без носков, some people say без носок; сапог - размер его сапог; ботинок - цвет моих ботинок and some others).

But as for the general rule - just use what I wrote above. If it is -я then it will be a zero ending (always, the same as for -а), but a soft sign will be used to keep softness: баня - бань, дыня - дынь, тётя - тёть, дядя - дядь (although dictionaries say "дядей" is possible, but I think it is outdated), Катя - Кать, пуля - пуль etc.

Could you elaborate a bit on the second part where you say that a soft sign will be used to keep it softness? For example, which one of these two is the gen. pl form? баня - бань

The first one is the dictionary form (nominative singular): баня. And in all of my other examples the same sequence is assumed.

So, "я" (as I hope you know) serves for two purposes: 1) represents the vowel sound of "а"; 2) indicates softness of "н". So, phonetically it is [б А н' а] (the stressed vowel capitalized, the apostrophe is used for softness). If you remove the nominative singular feminine ending [а] (to get the zero ending), what do you get then? [б А н'] Now spell it in Russian orthography: бань.

Thanks. Is the soft sign null ending also applied to nominative words ending in -a?

You did not get me

The soft sign does not belong to the ending.
You confuse pronunciation and spelling. Pronunciation is primary, spelling is a way to render the pronunciation in writing.

Compare two nouns in their pronunciation (the square brackets mean it is the phonetic transcription):
[с т р у н А] (nom sg, "string") -> [с т р У н]
[б А н' а] (nom sg, "bath") -> [б А н']

Do you see what I mean? The first noun (струна) has its stem with a hard consonant before the ending, the second one - with a soft consonant.

And let's write them with letters:
струна - струн
баня - бань

Actually, both струна and баня have the same ending - it is the feminine ending [а].
But the final consonant of their stems is different.

No i completely understand that. No worries we're having a communication problems. Thanks for your help! It's all good now.