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I read in the Wiktionary article on осел that it is an "uninfected" form of another word. The term "uninfected" is a Google Translate'd output for the term "неёфицированный" used in the article. I think it may be gibberish, as I couldn't find any translation or definition for it.

However, if there really are uninfected forms of words:

  • Does one word, a small number of words, or a large number of words have them? In the second and third cases, what are these words and are there any rules for how the uninfected forms are formed? If there are, what are they? If there aren't, in the second case of the first question, what are the uninfected forms?
  • When should I use them?

I did an online search, but couldn't find anything.

This question has been edited to make it more concise; the old version is available here. The answer given by Quassnoi isn't what I needed, but I've figured it out myself.

Orisphera
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    It's "uninflected" , from "inflection" – Quassnoi Oct 22 '22 at 15:16
  • If the Wiktionary entry contained "uninfected", I think that must've been a typo because that's not a linguistic term. – CocoPop Oct 25 '22 at 13:34
  • When you find the source, please add it into the question and it will be considered for reopening. Thanks! – Quassnoi Oct 27 '22 at 05:49
  • Свекла hints at «[не]нормативное»... – mustaccio Nov 05 '22 at 13:50
  • Congratulations! – Quassnoi Dec 16 '22 at 15:44
  • The question is closed, but as the OP found the entry now, I just wanted to add the "resolution": it is in fact "uninfected", a bad translation of неёфицированный. If the ё is replaced by ин, it would be correct. However, it simply means that it is the version of a word not containing ё, but е instead (осел is the не-ё-фицированный form of осёл). So it means not-ё-ified – king_nak Jan 10 '23 at 09:21
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    неёфицированный means "with the letter ё unmarked and written as е". The accepted answer here seems to answer your question: https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/1465/is-%d1%91-a-distinct-letter-or-is-it-just-%d0%b5-with-a-diaeresis If it does not, please add the points which you think were left unaddressed here, or open another question. Thank you! – Quassnoi Jan 11 '23 at 17:07
  • @Quassnoi Your last comment doesn't make any sense – Orisphera Jan 12 '23 at 14:10
  • @Orisphera: Russian phrase неёфицированная форма (what you call "uninfected form" in your question, although infections have nothing to do with it) means "form of word with the letter ё not marked with the diaeresis". Your question boils down to "when should I replace ё with е in my writing?". I've linked a post which I think answers this question. If you think this post does not answer your question, please specify what exactly is lacking in that answer. – Quassnoi Jan 12 '23 at 14:37
  • @Quassnoi That's ridiculous. I've never seen the letter Ё with a diaresis. – Orisphera Jan 12 '23 at 19:53

1 Answers1

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Uninfected words

There is no such thing in linguistics, simple as that.

It's really easy to confuse it with "uninflected" (which is what I think did happen), but if this is indeed what you saw on Wiktionary, it was a typo, a machine translation error or something like this.

Uninflected words

From Wikipedia:

In linguistic morphology, an uninflected word is a word that has no morphological markers (inflection) such as affixes, ablaut, consonant gradation, etc., indicating declension or conjugation. If a word has an uninflected form, this is usually the form used as the lemma for the word.

A lemma, or a base form, is the form of the word used to list this word in dictionaries and to generally refer to the word as a set of its all possible forms.

In Russian lexicography, the singular nominative is used as a lemma for nouns, the singular nominative masculine full for adjectives, the infinitive for verbs; and these are what sometimes is called the "uninflected forms".

It doesn't strictly conform to the definition above, because the sg. nom. of, say, the word река does have a non-zero flexion, whereas the pl. gen. form рек doesn't.

Most probably, one of the words you came across on Wiktionary had been a form of the word which happened to be a homonym for the base form of another word.

This could have been something like лис (pl. gen. of лиса "female fox") which is a homonym of лис "male fox"; Петь (neo-vocative of Петя, a male name) and петь "to sing"; пал (past masculine singular of пасть "to fall") and пал "controlled forest fire"; and so on.

To answer your questions:

Do one word, a small number of words, or a large number of words have them?

In the sense defined above, all words have them.

Some words don't have other forms, in which case they are usually called "invariable". There is a number of invariable words in Russian: function words like prepositions and conjunctions, adverbs, adjectival adverbs (деепричастия); also some borrowed nouns (метро, пальто, радио and so on). The percentage of invariable nouns in Russian is not big, although not tiny either, and some of them are used on the daily basis.

When should I use them?

You use them wherever you need to use this particular form: singular nominative for nouns, and so on.

Quassnoi
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