Thread: Starting from basics: nouns

Hmmmm. According to wikipedia.ru, "aardvark" in Russian is трубкозуб (masculine), not трубкозуба (feminine).

In any case, if you know a bit about biology and scientific Latin, and also know enough about Russian word-formation to understand how "calques" from Greek or Latin work, then трубкозуб is actually a pretty interesting word -- it's an obvious calque of the Latin Tubulidentata ("tube-tooth") the taxonomic "Order" (Отряд) to which aardvarks belong. (The Russian calque of "aardvark", which is Afrikaans for "earth pig", would be something close to землесвинья, I guess.)

However, if you're at a beginning level of Russian and you haven't yet learned such basic words as зуб ("tooth"), I'm not sure that it's very useful to learn the declension of uncommon words like трубкозуб!

P.S. The masculine noun зуб (plural: зубы) looks like this in the singular:

Nom.зуб
Gen. зуба
Dat. зубу
Acc. зуб
Inst. зубом
Prep. зубе

And трубкозуб would follow the same pattern except that it would be трубкозуба in the accusative (because it's a masculine noun referring to a living creature).

аббат - singular masculine
аббаты - plural

аббат - nominative

аббатя - genitive

аббатю - dative

аббате - accusative

аббатем - instrumental

аббате - prepositional

There are two choices in instrumental ем and ом. What are the rules on declension. There are so many choices to choose from in genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional. Kindly lay down the rules. Thanks.