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Pronouns

ты and вы

Exactly the French arrangement. вы is plural and polite at once, takes plural verbs even about one person, and is capitalised as Вы in a letter. Moving to ты is a small ceremony, and the older or more senior person offers it — дава́й на ты.

Using ты to a stranger is not casual, it is rude. To a police officer it is close to a provocation.

No Mr, no Frau — patronymics instead

Polite address is name + patronymic: Ива́н Петро́вич, Мари́я Серге́евна. The patronymic is your father's name with -ович / -евич for a man and -овна / -евна for a woman.

A colleague of twenty years is still Ива́н Петро́вич. The surname is for lists and documents.

They decline too

его́ is said /jɪˈvo/ — the г in these endings is always /v/, a spelling frozen from the middle ages.

After a preposition, the third-person pronouns grow an н-: у него́, с ней, о них.

The dative experiencer

Russian puts you in the dative for anything that happens to you, and there is no subject at all.

• Мне хо́лодно. — "To me it is coldly" — I'm cold.
• Мне нра́вится. — "It is pleasing to me" — I like it.
• Мне ну́жен слова́рь. — "To me a dictionary is needed."
• Мне два́дцать лет. — "To me there are twenty years" — I'm twenty.

Hindi does the same thing, and the two languages are related only distantly.

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