Обсуждение:потребовать

Would it be useful to indicate the corresponding nesov. (требовать?) nl:Gebruiker:Jcwf

That would be indicated in the etymology section.

--Schwallex 14:41, 17 мая 2006 (UTC)

?? This is grammar more than etymology. Besides often the sov and nesov. have no etymological connection. Take vz'at' and brat'.

Well, that's a whole 'nother story. In fact, one could even argue that ‘взять’ and ‘брать’ are kinda tied together much more firmly than ‘потребовать’ and ‘требовать’, precisely because they are not related.

Anyway, the problem with such pairs is that they aren't actual pairs. The mapping only goes one way (more precisely, for the nerds out there: the mapping function is not, err, bijective).

Sure, you can easily go from ‘потребовать’ to ‘требовать’, but you can't just as easily go back (what about ‘затребовать’ and ‘востребовать’?).

Similarly, you can go from ‘взять’ to ‘брать’, but if you go back to perfective you don't necessarily arrive at ‘взять’; ‘забрать’, ‘убрать’, ‘прибрать’, etc are just as legitimate candidates. And, to add insult to injury, going yet again to imperfective from those ones doesn't get you back to ‘брать’, but rather to ‘забирать’, ‘убирать’ and ‘прибирать’.

And I'm not even mentioning ‘добираться’. (^_^)

Now, my point is not that all this information is utterly useless and we should just sweep it under the rug altogether. In fact, going back to your original question: yes, I do think it would be useful to indicate aspects, reflexion, etc. My point is that simply mentioning a word pair won't suffice. We'll probably have to come up with something much more comprehensive and scalable first. And in the mean time, there are at least ethymological and morphological references (which should be perfectly enough for a native Russian speaker anyway).

--Schwallex 17:33, 17 мая 2006 (UTC)