II.

Character

The Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet; it has 33 letters. Spelling is basically, though not completely, phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are few and simple. Russian has no article, either definite or indefinite. The three grammatical genders into which all Russian nouns fall are the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter. The nouns are declined according to case and number. The six cases are the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional, and the two numbers are the singular and the plural. Adjectives agree with nouns in gender, case, and number. The verb has three tenses, present, past, and future; in addition it has the category of aspect. The two aspects are the imperfective, presenting the action as a process of repetition, and the perfective, presenting the action as a unified whole, usually from the point of view of its completion. The distinction in aspect is preserved in all three moods, indicative, subjunctive-conditional, and imperative, and in participles, both adverbial and adjectival, the latter being either passive or active. Due to declension and conjugation, the word order in Russian is not as strict as in English. A typical feature of Russian vocabulary is large families of words derived from the same root by means of various prefixes and suffixes.