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Numeral case agreement question

schmimby

Numeral case agreement question

Post by schmimby »

[Они] смогли найти только 53 учителей
Hi this is a sentence that I found on some instagram account. I am wondering, how do you read out the number 53 here? Is it пятьдесят три? Or is it пятидесяти трёх, on account of учитель being animate and assuming that 53 учителей is supposed to be in the accusative here as a direct object?
I've noticed that the TTS function on Google translate, when given a sentence with plain numbers in it, usually does a pretty good job of reading them out in the correct case form and everything, and in this case it reads the number in nominative form пятьдесят три. But I just wanted to check if someone knowledgeable could confirm.

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duome

Re: Numeral case agreement question

Post by duome »

nominative = пятьдесят три
genitive = пятидесяти трёх
dative = петидесяти трём
accusative = пятьдесят трёх (animate), пятьдесят три (inanimate)
instrumental = пятьюдесятью тремя
prepositional = о пятидесяти трёх

** edited

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duome

Re: Numeral case agreement question

Post by duome »

Actually, you got me thinking of this twice, because if i were to say "50", I would actually say "пятьдесят учителей", and if I were to say "3", I would definitely say "трех" or rather "троих учителей"... :oops:

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duome

Re: Numeral case agreement question

Post by duome »

I asked a few other people and we thought that at least part of the confusion comes from the very unusual number itself - we cannot think of a real life situation where one would speak of 53 teachers in accusative case, and even though it's technically possible (i.e. grammatically correct), it's very rare to hear that, and that's why we may have some doubts about what would be the correct way to say it, but this is also a good example of when it's better to simply reword the phrase to keep the meaning but get rid of any ambiguities.

schmimby

Re: Numeral case agreement question

Post by schmimby »

Wow, thanks so much. That is more help than I was expecting :) So, if I understand correctly: Usually for accusative the number agrees with the animacy status of the noun after the number, but sometimes with unusual numbers, people's grammatical instinct may not be very strong on this matter, and it's better to just reword the phrase to avoid awkwardness or ambiguity.

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