это солнечно!

[threeplusfire]

Gods above, there is sunlight. I celebrated by cleaning my bathroom and doing laundry. Really though, I was so glad to open up all the doors. I also hung one of the remaining strands of blue christmas lights up in my room over the glass doors.

My friend Ashley from New York is here, so I must catch her this afternoon. Also Kythryne and Amy are here. It's funny that everyone i regularly see in Austin went out of town this weekend, and then people from faraway came to town.

I am still without my car. This is extremely upsetting. I woke up unhappy in large part due to this fact.

Right now I'm going to run some errands while I still have use of my mother's car.

Comments

[indicolite.livejournal.com]

Kythryne and Amy - wow.

Sorry to point it out, but your title is not very grammatical. It looks like you were literally translating "It's sunny" and Russian does not use expletive pronouns (In English, since every sentence should have a subject, "it" in "it is sunny" and "there" in "there are strange things here" are both 'dummy' pronouns, called expletives, surprisingly enough - yeah, I am a linguistics major who hated syntax but still remembers some of it.) Это солнечно I process as "This is sunny" which implies that you are talking about some particular thing that is sunny, which...just sounds odd. Just plain солнечно or сейчас солнечно , наконец-то солнечно...would convey your meaning. Apologies: it just bothered me.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

One of my Russian teachers frequently used this particular form in casual conversations. Hence, it was something that we absorbed and it was explained that it was strictly a colloquialism. (Especially when critiquing our work on the chalkboard, as I recall.) Probably a bad habit, but just one of those things I picked up and probably also partially due to the influence of my Czech on my Russian. Grammar & linguistics have not ever been my strong suits. Somehow I learned four languages without ever absorbing much of the process and formalism of grammar's rules.

[indicolite.livejournal.com]

Your teacher has a point; it would make sense with the vast majority of adjectives: это красиво, это правильно are grammatical. However, "sunny" is one of those rare adjectives that can't actually take a noun as a subject, in Russian or English - you can't have something be sunny (someone's character, perhaps, but it still seems a little odd to point to someone and say "You see her character? THAT is sunny") - so with most other adjectives that CAN take a noun, you would have been fully correct, but not this one. It has never occurred to me before, but это is 'placeholding' (not a technical term) for a subject noun, and if the adjective can't take a subject noun, it can't take the placeholder for it either :-) One context I can imagine for это солнечно is sarcastically, with a question mark following: "This is sunny? You call this sunny?"

I find this stuff cool. But then, the whole point of linguistics as a science is to look at things that native speakers just find "wrong" and try to explain WHY they are wrong. Often, though, their explanations seem way too complicated, even for a subconscious process - that's what got me ticked off with syntactic theory.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I have to disagree about the use of the adjective sunny. For example, one can say that an outlook or disposition is sunny. I've heard sunny used to replace rosy in sentences.