Absolute Construction
Despite the inflectional nature of Russian, there is no equivalent in the modern language to the English nominative absolute or the Latin ablative absolute construction. The old language had an absolute construction, with the noun put into the dative. Like so many other archaisms, it is retained in Church Slavonic. Among the last known examples in literary Russian occurs in Radishchev's Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (Путешествие из Петербурга в Москву ), 1790:
- Едущу мне из Едрова, Анюта из мысли моей не выходила. "As I was leaving Yedrovo village, I could not stop thinking about Aniuta."
Read more about this topic: Russian Grammar, Syntax
Famous quotes containing the words absolute and/or construction:
“All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)