Questions & Answers about Что-то случилось ночью.
Why do we use что-то here instead of just что?
Что usually means "what" (a question word) or "that" (a conjunction). Adding the suffix -то turns it into the indefinite pronoun "something". The speaker knows an event occurred but doesn't know exactly what it was.
I am learning about these pronouns. Could I say что-нибудь случилось ночью instead?
It would sound strange here. We use words ending in -то when talking about a specific but unknown thing that actually happened (a fact). We use words ending in -нибудь (meaning "anything") for hypothetical situations, questions, or future events. Since this happened in the past and is a real fact, что-то is the correct choice.
Why does the verb случилось end in -ось?
Two things are happening here! First, the pronoun что-то (just like что) is grammatically neuter, so it takes the neuter past tense ending -о. Second, случиться (to happen) is a reflexive verb. Because the neuter ending -о is a vowel, the reflexive suffix -ся shrinks to -сь, giving us случилось.
Why is the word for "night" (ночь) written as ночью here?
Ночью is in the instrumental case. In Russian, times of day (morning, day, evening, night) are put into the instrumental case to act as adverbs that tell us when something happened. So, the feminine noun ночь becomes ночью to mean "at night".
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