I don't recall for sure. I dn't recall the Russian equivalent of 'the' existing.

See discussion on this here:
http://russianmentor.net/gram/mailbag/topics/article1.htm

Good catch - more evidence that the Russian bots are orchestrating the sheep following Trump.

I am reminded of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, where Boris and Natasha were also after "Moose and Squirrel", not the moose and the squirrel.

😜

...definitively authenticated by one of the best television shows of all time.

Thanks for the laugh!

I wondered why - I hadn't noticed the lack of articles used by MAGA idiots.

Very eastern europeans way of saying squirrel. Like two syllables squir-rel... good catch btw..
m

That's why you'll hear "We need wall" because of no articles.

And due to no present tense of "to be" you'll hear things like "I American."
In Russian it is: Я американец. There is no "am" in that sentence.

That caught my attention too. I have a friend who speaks a Slavic language as their first language for whom I used to proofread graduate level papers and thesis when their spouse, a linguist was not available. That was their greatest challenge with English, the use of articles.

I used to know some Bulgarians and I didn't notice that they used them. We had funny linguistic jokes we'd play on each other but none of them differed in their use of articles. Some of them barely spoke English.

Could be and I just didn't notice.

They're postposed.

jazik = language
jazikot or jazika = the language.

There's supposedly a difference between the two forms of the article in the standard language. I learned it a long time ago. And never really noticed that it was in use much in the stuff I had to read. (Never spoke the language.)

These two languages are part of a Sprachbund, a set of languages that are quite different but managed to share some grammatical features. So Romanian's articles are also postposed; and I think Albanian's.

many linguistic shifts took place in that area such that some languages retained some aspects while losing others and the opposite for a language that developed, perhaps, on a different side of the same mountain range, for instance. Wars also made a lot of linguistic changes take place. There was a lot of that sort of activity in the area over a very long time.

I got curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language

but made up of different 'wall' (defense) sections, some of it being fence construction, 'virtual fence' defense etc.

It does not have articles. Therefore, it appears that the Russian bots have found very receptive, useful-idiot targets.

Also Slavic usage without an article, in this case Slovenian (Melanie).

And not to forget that Ivana Trump was Czech--more Slavic. Does Donny have some strange attraction to Slavic culture?

comments that end up being removed. too.

Well...not really, but I used to know a LOT of Russian translators; when they worked, they always had a "Russian-English Obscenities Dictionary" right next to them, and they used the yebat' out of it.

Intonation and word order do the trick.

All things being equal,

"we demand wall" comes out as "we demand a wall"

"wall we demand" comes out more as "we demand the wall." Screw with intonation and it can go the other way. But new information--which is typically with "a" in English--comes last. Old information--with "the"--tends to be earlier in the sentence.

(Articles do a few things in English. I still like Enc's Linguistic Inquiry article from, gee, the late '90s or early '00s for his analysis.)

Note that Russian *does* have a present tense of "to be" but it isn't used to assign attributes like in English. They also use other words.

"Jon's a student" "Dzhon -- student."

"Jon, who's a student, is president of his committee" "Dzhon, student, yavlyaetsya prezidentom komiteta". "Yavlyat'sya" serves as "to be".

Emphatically, the oddball emphatic construction like "Jon is music" is "Dzhon est' muzyka" where byt' is "to be" (and shows up as est' ... it only has two forms, est' in the singular and sut' in the plural; we tell beginners never to use them).

How many of these traitor actually speak Russian or a language close enough to be used in their criminal endeavors?

I started to wonder about this when I saw and heard none other than the despicable Roy Moore of AL speak fluent Russian to a reporter in a snarky comment at the end of an interview.

I know that probably all of the crime family does but who else? And who in Congress and the who is the Cabinet?

The stuff you learn about different things on this forum is great!! I never new about slavic languages not using articles..
So is that like kids now a days say " oh that's so fun" when it should be so MUCH fun?

m