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In a recent interview, a man, whose son had passed away, stated:

A good father teaches his son about life, but my son taught me!

The portion after the comma presents a paradox in the speakers mind: my son (unlike other sons) taught me (of all things!).

In English this is accomplished with stress and intonation, as indicated by my italics. I believe in Russian, this is expressed with stress, intonation AND (I suspect) particles.

CocoPop
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1 Answers1

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You are right, in Russian is accomplished with stress and intonation, and in the case of your sentence also with the particle же after the word which shows what is "unlike others", this particle intensifies the contrast. In this case no conjunction is used:

Хороший отец учит своего сына жизни, мой же [сын] научил меня.

Also, you can do without any particles and with a conjunction:

Хороший отец учит своего сына жизни, а мой [сын] научил меня.

In both cases 'son' can be omitted, since Russian has neither like my/mine distinction nor "one" as a universal substitution for any noun.

Yellow Sky
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    ommision of "son" would sound ambigous, as it is not clear why "мой" should mean "мой сын", not "мой отец" – Shady_arc Jun 01 '14 at 15:51
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    @Shady_arc: That's a good point! – CocoPop Jun 01 '14 at 16:34
  • @Yellow Sky: I have seen же used in this way, and have also seen -то. Is мой-то сын possible here, or does it have another meaning? How would it differ? – CocoPop Jun 01 '14 at 16:36
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    "мой-то сын" won't work here. It is difficult to explain in a few words, though. Fortunately, there are articles on the topic. -то marks a contrasting topic possessing some property against some other thing that possesses some other property ("Я-то давно здесь, а вот где был"~"I have been here long enough, but where have you been"). The important thing is, the information is known to the listener but not activated in their mind, so this way you attract attention to a known fact in order to make some statement or ask a question. – Shady_arc Jun 01 '14 at 17:31
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    "же" marks a stronger "contradiction", incompatible with some previous information ("usually iti s father who teahes a son life, but not so for me and my son"). Here it is used to mark a topic: ".., as for my son — it is him who taught me". – Shady_arc Jun 01 '14 at 17:38
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    Sometimes "же" is used to give an new, "incompatible" statement in the situation when the listener has only one part of information activated, while the speaker thinks that the statement marked by "же", the "contradiction", should have been known by the listener and activated, but isn't ("Он же не умеет плавать!"="But he cannot swim!" - i.e. the listener acts as if the person can swim while he should have known or guessed that it is not the case). – Shady_arc Jun 01 '14 at 17:39
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    @Shady_arc - "а мой сын-то меня научил" can work, -то here adds some surprise and/or pride to that sentence, but also makes it more colloquial. – Yellow Sky Jun 01 '14 at 18:07
  • Yes, it is grammatical but it doesn't work in the way that it doesn't convey the message and sounds ambiguous. – Shady_arc Jun 01 '14 at 19:04
  • Excuse my lack of knowledge when it comes to Russian sentence structure and declensions, but in the original sentence, it says about life. Here, we just see жизни - do we omit about because we decline жизнь prepositionally? – Timr Jun 02 '14 at 17:57
  • @Timr - "To teach about life" is "учить жизни" in Russian, that's a set expression. – Yellow Sky Jun 03 '14 at 15:54
  • @Timr: учить can take two objects: the person taught (acc) and the subject taught (dat). That's why жизни in this case is dative. – CocoPop Jun 05 '14 at 03:04