Cold case: A linguistic mystery yields clues in Russian
When it comes to numbers, Russian grammar has a bewildering thicket of rules. A singular noun such as “table” (“stol” in Russian), used as the subject of a sentence, takes a special “case form” called the nominative singular. When used with numbers five and above, table takes a different form called the genitive plural (“pjat’ stolov”). And with numbers from two to four, it takes still a different form, the genitive singular (“dva stola”). But with any number whose last digit is 1, the proper case is again the nominative singular: In Russian, “5,281 children” would be translated literally as “5,281 child.” Many of these forms change again if the noun is the object of a preposition.“Russian has this astonishing mess with the numbers,” says David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics and head of MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. What interests Pesetsky most...