Duo Russian Grammar

66) Fleeting Vowels

Sometimes a word gets an extra vowel or loses a vowel when declined to a different form:

  • 1 чашка → 5 чашек
  • 1 день → 2 дня
  • 1 кусок → 2 куска

It only happens to О and Е and will mostly give you trouble in words having certain suffixes. Such sounds are called fleeting vowels and appear/disappear quite regularly in some stems.

►if a vowel appears, it only happens in Genitive plural

► if a vowel vanishes, it is everywhere except Nominative singular.

Here, we maily focus on the following words:

  • those that have -ок/ек (ец) as a suffix. The vowel disappears in all forms except Nom.sg)
  • feminine nouns with the suffix -к. Usually a vowel appears in Genitive plural. Е appears after "soft" consonants or hushes (дочек, чашек), О appears everywhere else (банок).
  • some nouns that have vowels appear or disappear in the stem consonant cluster

The existence of these vowels can be traced back to the time when Ь and Ъ used to be short vowels ("yers"). Back then, all syllables in Russian had to end in a vowel. Later, these sounds were lost in weak positions (word-final position or the position before a stressed vowel/a strong position).

But that's history. Anyway, it is nice to know that in «сто»/«сотня» (a hundred), «со мной» there is a good reason for "о" to be where it is. The disappearing vowel in «весь»/«все» has the same origin.

Some of the fleeting vowels in Modern Russian have appeared from an analogy with other words and have no historical basis in Old East Slavic.

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