Vincas sent me a photo he took of a sign in Užupis naming the republic in all five historical languages of the city:
- UŽUPIO RESPUBLIKA (Lithuanian)
- ЗАРАЧАНСКАЯ РЭСПУБЛІКА (Belarusian)
- רעפּובליק פון זאַרעטשע (Yiddish)
- РЕСПУБЛИКА ЗАРЕЧЬЕ (Russian)
- REPUBLIKA ZARZECZA (Polish)
Here we have four different grammatical ways of expressing “Republic of Užupis.” The Lithuanian and Polish take two nouns and create a relationship via putting the name, “Užupis” and “Zarzecze,” in the genitive case. Imagine something like “Užupis’s Republic.” The Yiddish works like it would in English, joining the two nouns with a preposition. The Belarusian creates an adjectival form of Užupis, so it’s something like “Užupish Republic.” But the Russian completely confused the hell out of me at first. The ending “-е” is seen in many cases for nouns, but not in the genitive. Not ever. I wondered if maybe the word used for Užupis was in some kind of dialect. But my Russian teacher said, no, it was a regular nominative.
What’s interesting here is that I was completely stumped at this point—I was so completely convinced that the Russian would follow the pattern of the Lithuanian or Polish with a genitive, that I could not imagine “Заречье” as a nominative. Only the next day, after sleeping on it, did it dawn on me how on earth two nominatives in a row could make sense: the Russian form was using, simply, an appositive.
We see appositives (or adnominal genitives, as my Russian teacher called it) and things like them all the time in English, where we string nouns together like we were crazy. Today, when I was at the Regenstein Library, I walked past a computer lab. These constructions are all over our political language, and the language of government. I’m still waiting, for example, for my income tax refund from the Internal Revenue Service. The government is criticized for the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort and the trailer cities FEMA built.
So where we had “Užupis’s Republic,” “Republic of Užupis,” and “Užupish Republic,” with the other four languages, the Russian phrase was just the very basic “Užupis Republic.” Yet for me, it was incomprehensible, since I never would have suspected that a synthetic language would use an appositive like that. Of course, in making my wild generalization, I had completely forgotten that I only knew about appositives because of the examples from Latin, including the famous “urbs Roma” (literally, “The City Rome”).
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