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Comment by sfblah | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated to the actual content, but in Russian is it normal to decline the last name of someone who is not Russian as they did at the beginning of the letter?

"Открытое письмо господину Цукербергу"

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Pretty sure you're asking whether the name shouldn't be in the nominative case instead. The answer is, basically any word is inflected in Russian, with some exceptions where the dative case can be identical to the nominative—and even such words can be quite naturally bent into the different cases, in casual speech. The ‘nationality’ of the name doesn't matter, though foreign names or words may initially not be assimilated in the language enough for the inflections to be established and accepted.

One example of a case when the dative form would be the same as the nominative, is if the recipient was a Mrs. Zuckerberg, since this specific kind of the last name isn't inflected when it's of the feminine grammatical gender.

There's also the dubious trend of avoiding inflection of brand names for any and all purposes—but that's just contrary to how Russian works, and is dictated instead by whims of marketing people who lack the sense for the language.

The grammar applies whether the name is Russian or not with some edge-case exceptions that can roughly be described as 'when it sounds weird and/or like something else' i.e. they tend to be almost 'phonetic'. A name ending in -berg or the like, though, is a perfectly regular (for Russian) name that could just as easily be a Russian last name. An example off the top of my head:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ehrenburg

The didn’t decline the last name. They omitted the first name. “господину Цукербергу” = “to Mr. Zuckerberg”, which is acceptable in English as well.

If it's not being declined, why is there a "у" at the end of Цукербергу?

It even matches the ending of господину, which -- without the у -- sure looks like the courtesy title "Gospodin". You're sure that's not a case marker?

I misunderstood the question. I think the question is why both "господину" and "Цукербергу" are declined, given that "Цукербергу" has non-slavic origin. I think typically the rule is that only names of Slavic origin are declined along with generic name, such as "в город Минск", "в город Киев", "в город Москву". But the foreign names it is not, e.g. "в город Сан Франциско", "в город Сан Сиэтл". I think it definitely true for geographical names, and probably for last names as well. However, even for geographical names there many names that considered long assimilated, e.g. "в городе Санкт-Петербурге".

I think the same true for a last name such as Цукербергу. There are plenty of people with Germanic last names, especially ending with -berg, -man, -baum, etc, so maybe it is considered assimilated enough that it follows rules for Slavic based names.

Yes, the endings are case markers here. YeBanKo probably misunderstood your question.

Russian "У" sounds the same as english "oo". And here, it is placed at the ends of both words as dative preposition, to indicate that it is "*to* Mr. Zuckerberg".

If it was Putin instead of Zuckerberg, it would work just the same, "господину Путину". No difference at all, regardless of whether the last name is Russian or not.

And yet it's not in the dative case (ie declined)?

It is, the gggp comment is mistaken in saying that—I think the author is just not too familiar with English terminology for this.

It is declined. The point I was making is that it was declined not because it was a foreign last name. Swapping Zuckerberg for Putin in that sentence would decline Putin's last name in the exact same way.

I see, thank you. As an aside, you would not decline the transliteration of a foreign name in Greek. They used to "Greekify" the names a century ago and decline them, but now that sounds extremely dated and odd.

In Russian, the amount to which words were assimilated has also changed depending on which foreign language was in vogue at the time, and to what extent. In the past, pronunciations of English borrowed words became closer to Russian standards. But now that English is trendy for the past thirty years after the USSR collapse—all the way to using branding in English on signage and advertising—often English pronunciation is almost unchanged, as much as it's possible. Afaiu it was the same in the past with French borrowings and then German ones (or perhaps in the reverse order)—kinda similar to English flirtings with French and Latin, but thankfully without such a mess in spelling.

However, Цукерберг/Zuckerberg is quite natural for Russian due to being an obviously Jewish name. The first letter isn't even the voiced ‘z’ in Russian, but a ‘ts’, because that's how analogous Jewish names are pronounced here.

> But now that English is trendy for the past thirty years after the USSR collapse—all the way to using branding in English on signage and advertising—often English pronunciation is almost unchanged, as much as it's possible.

Now that you mention it, that's exactly what happened with Greek too. Branding used to be Greek, then sort-of-foreignified Greek (eg Greek words with a foreign suffix) and now just English.

> first letter isn't even the voiced ‘z’ in Russian, but a ‘ts’,

That's probably because of the German pronunciation, no?

Hmm, weird about the branding in Greece, since afaik you haven't had a sudden-ish disappearance of an Iron Curtain with a resulting influx of Western culture. But I guess that globalism-aka-Americanism is more widespread than just our case.

> That's probably because of the German pronunciation, no?

Well yeah. Wiktionary notes straight away that the surname is Ashkenazic—it was most probably naturalized in Russian through Ukraine's and specifically Odessa's Jewish population. The more familiar variation here is ‘Zuckerman’.

In Russian, it would depend on the last name in question specifically, as well as the gender of the person talked about. I am a native speaker, but I don't know which specific grammar rule governs it.

For example, Zuckerberg absolutely gets declined and gets that "oo" at the end. "To Mr. Dorsey" doesn't get changed (i.e., no added "oo" at the end) due to declining (but it still gets declined), while "to Mr. Smith" definitely gets that extra "oo" at the end due to declining. But "to Mrs. Smith" is unchanged after declining, so it doesn't get that same "oo" ending.

How much does modern Greek rely on its case marking? It seems like one especially common use of foreign names would be to report on something that happened outside Greece with all non-Greek participants. But that's pretty much the worst case for giving up on overt case-marking; none of the nouns would have an obvious case.

Not very much, you have the articles that help give context. For example, you'd say "του κυρίου Ζούκερμπεργκ" and "του κυρίου" (rather than "ο κύριος") makes it clear that it's the genitive case.

Here and generally yes, but there are some exceptions, which are too complex to explain in a comment here.

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